AN ECOCRITICAL APPROACH: EARLY MODERN ENGLISH EPIC POSSIBILITIES

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

1-1-2024

Abstract

This chapter explores ecocritical approaches to the epic; in order to outline some ways epics may be read ecocritically, this chapter examines the specimen case of the early modern English epic. Considering the Renaissance English epic’s flourishing alongside the early Plantationocene, as well as the epic’s interest in centering human transactions with the more-than-human world, I suggest that the genre offered extended thought experiments about how to conceptualize environment. By innovating and redeploying conventional generic markers of the epic (the voyage to the underworld, catalogues, travel, etc.), the English epic revised its European cousins and Greco-Roman analogues in order to explore the imbrications of human and non-human phenomena. Yet many of these epics, attuned to the possibilities of reimagining ecological interdependence, nevertheless index the early modern period’s social inequalities and oppressive structures, many of which continue to drive environmental and racial injustice today. Looking especially at Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene (first half published in 1590, second half in 1596) and John Milton’s Paradise Lost (first edition published in 1667, and Milton’s second, revised edition in 1674), this chapter proposes understanding the early modern English epic as revelatory of the interactions among humans and more-than-human, alongside the ethical repercussions of those interactions.

Publication Source (Journal or Book title)

The Epic World

First Page

45

Last Page

59

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