Challenges to an Irish Eco-Criticism

Abstract

If the term ‘Green Studies’ is a contemporary synonym for ‘eco-criticism’ then Ireland would seem a natural habitat (as it were) for the practice of eco-criticism. No country has been more identified with the green world; and had Irish Studies been called from the first ‘Green Studies’ few would have objected in the days before environmentalism and before other colours in the cultural, if not political, Irish spectrum were admitted. Irish paradigmatic perceptions and representations of the natural world still exert great cultural influence on and in our literature – the aesthetic, the scientific, the economic, the Romantic, the nativist, the religious, the folkloristic. Of these, only the economic and scientific have not been culturally celebrated by many literary critics, while science’s productions – from nature-writing to scientific papers and monographs – are largely ignored by critics and anthologists, and by writers who are scientifically unsympathetic, indifferent or not conversant. Yet eco-criticism requires the scientific paradigm, and while a truly environmental literature may not have come into being in Ireland there is nevertheless a great deal of Irish writing can stimulate future ecocrticial discussions.