The Formation of a Field: Ecocriticism in America—An Interview with Cheryll Glotfelty

Abstract

The classic anthology the ecocriticism reader: landmarks in literary ecology (1996), edited by cheryll glotfelty and Harold Fromm, was the first of its kind to bring together an array of scholarship that focused on a relatively unrecognized field of study: ecocriticism. This singular publication was the brainchild of Glotfelty, who worked with Fromm to produce a collection that stands at the gates of our contemporary era as a harbinger of the significant criticism and curricula that would shape literary studies in English departments across the country. The Ecocriticism Reader accompanied a new wave of interest in the field as seen in contemporaneous publications such as Karl Kroeber's Ecological Literary Criticism (1994) and Lawrence Buell's The Environmental Imagination (1995).