American Transcendentalism as the Complement of Ecocriticism

Abstract

Ecocriticism has been one of the prominent theories of literary criticism. However, its practitioners have felt some inconvenience in their practice. Objective of this paper is to know the matters that have made the practitioners of ecocriticism feel uneasy in their practice and supply solution to their problems. The paper argues that the uneasy felt by the practitioners of ecocriticism is caused by the fact that there is no dominant canonical guideline in ecocriticism. The paper proposes that this gap can be fulfilled by adopting some prominent features of American transcendentalism: that nature is the manifestation of universal soul; that human being is analogous to nature; and hence human actions should be made proportionate to the order of nature. This study can add some in the process of making ecocriticism emerge as a complete philosophy of the relationship between human being and nature, which thereby could create harmony in and between them.