1999 Fiscal Year Final Research Report Summary
Ecocriticism in English Literature - Environmental Tradition and the Notion of Nature in Literary Text
| Project/Area Number |
10610454
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| Research Category |
Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (C)
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| Allocation Type | Single-year Grants |
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| Section | 一般 |
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| Research Field |
英語・英米文学
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| Research Institution | TOHOKU UNIVERSITY |
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Principal Investigator |
OTOMO Yoshikatsu Faculty of Language and Culture, Tohoku University, Professor, 言語文化部, 教授 (60007333)
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| Co-Investigator(Kenkyū-buntansha) |
OZAWA Hiroshi Faculty of Arts and Letters, Kwansei-Gakuin University, Professor, 文学部, 教授 (70169291)
ロビンソン ピーター 東北大学, 文学部, 外国人教師
ISHIHATA Naoki Faculty of Language and Culture, Tohoku University, Associate Professor, 言語文化部, 助教授 (30125497)
ROBINSON Peter Faculty of Arts and Letters, Tohoku University, Foreign Teacher
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| Project Period (FY) |
1998 – 1999
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| Keywords | English Literature / notion of Nature / British Romanticism / ecology / ecocriticism / environment |
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| Research Abstract |
It has only been two centuries since the color of green was associated with Nature's universal robe. A more enduring view of Nature has been its association with "everything", stemming from the pre-Socratic era's usage of the Greek word phusis. Successively demoted by the Platonic, Aristotelian, and Christian conceptions, Nature's meaning has changed. As medieval Christianity established the Creator of phusis, Nature became a symbolic creature representing the world derived from chaos. The name, "Nature", enabled the personification or apotheosis of it, which has proved its most potent sense to the present day. Then the late eighteenth century saw an enormous shrinkage in the meaning, "Nature" coming to mean the green landscape in the works of the Romantic poets.
We are the descendents of the Romantics, since we owe the modern notion of Nature and this appreciation of our environment and ecosystem to them. Consider, for instance, Wordsworth's well-known phrase "We murder to dissect" in "The Tables Turned" - a highlight of his love of and sympathy with Nature inseparable from his critique of contemporary scientific rationalism. The spiritual wandering of Wordsworth and Tanabe in search of "disinterested love for nature's disinterested beauty" may exemplify human's predestined journey in search of ecological coexistence with our environment. Man repeats this journey every day, every year, and every century.
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Research Products
(2 results)
