English Studies

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Ecocriticism and Narrative Theory: An Introduction

Erin James & Eric Morel

To cite this article: Erin James & Eric Morel (2018) Ecocriticism and Narrative Theory: An
Introduction, English Studies, 99:4, 355-365, DOI: 10.1080/0013838X.2018.1465255

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ENGLISH STUDIES
2018, VOL. 99, NO. 4, 355–365
https://doi.org/10.1080/0013838X.2018.1465255

Ecocriticism and Narrative Theory: An Introduction

Erin Jamesa and Eric Morelb
a
Department of English, University of Idaho, Moscow, ID, USA; bDepartment of English, University of
Washington, Seattle, WA, USA

This collection of essays follows upon the success of a previous special issue of English
Studies focused on ecocriticism, edited by Astrid Bracke and Marguérite Corporaal and pub-
lished in November 2010. In their introduction to that collection of essays, Bracke and Cor-
poraal argue that ecocriticism, or the “study of human–nature relations in literature, film
and other cultural expressions”, has grown beyond its initial parameters within American
and British nature writing to occupy a spot “at the forefront of current trends in the
study of literatures in English”.1 Adding to this growth, the essays in Bracke and Corporaal’s
issue reflect new developments in ecocriticism at the time, especially contemporary novels
by writers such as Margaret Atwood, Cormac McCarthy and Kim Stanley Robinson that
“express the ambivalence of the contemporary situation in which nature is either idealized
or lamented; present or irretrievably lost”.2 Particularly interesting to the contributors in the
special issue are the various ways that these narratives engage the theme of the apocalypse.
Ecocriticism has continued to grow since the publication of Bracke and Corporaal’s
issue, especially in terms of its relationship to narrative. A rich site of this growth is in eco-
criticism’s interest in narrative form. While—as the shared focus on the theme of apoca-
lypse in the 2010 special issue suggests—traditionally ecocritics have privileged the content
of narratives over their form, an increasing number of scholars interested in the intersec-
tions of literature and environment are turning their attention to the very structures by
which narratives represent and construct environments for their readers, and are thus
increasingly engaging in the concepts and lexicon of narratology, or narrative theory.
The essays in this special issue reflect this growth and identify rich new directions for eco-
critical and narratological scholarship.

The Turn Towards Narrative Theory

To appreciate the turn towards narrative theory within ecocriticism and the relevance of
this development to English studies, it helps to survey the evolution of the ecocritical scho-
larship. While what counts as ecocriticism remains open to discussion, ecocritics still fre-
quently invoke some or all of Cheryll Glotfelty’s pioneering statement in The Ecocriticism
Reader (1996) that
simply put, ecocriticism is the study of the relationship between literature and the phys-
ical environment. Just as feminist criticism examines language and literature from

CONTACT Erin James ejames@uidaho.edu; Eric Morel egmorel@uw.edu

1
Bracke and Corporaal, 709.
2
Ibid.
© 2018 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
356 E. JAMES AND E. MOREL

a gender-conscious perspective, and Marxist criticism brings an awareness of modes of pro-

duction and economic class to its reading of texts, ecocriticism takes an earth-centered
approach to literary studies.3

Strategically capacious, this initial framing of ecocriticism’s scope does more to propose a
field of inquiry than a set of tools for working in that field. Critics from within and without
have sometimes bemoaned this breadth, latching onto phrases such as Lawrence Buell’s
that ecocriticism “lacks the kind of paradigm-defining statement that, for example,
Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978) supplied for colonial discourse studies.”4 Yet, as its
wide citation would suggest, Glotfelty’s definition may explain why ecocriticism has fos-
tered various projects—without a single voice to direct scholarship, there are more seats
at the table for those interested in joining a scholarly conversation.
Likewise, ecocriticism’s object of study has proved more dynamic than static. In his
2005 articulation of ecocriticism’s genealogy, Buell inaugurated a wave metaphor for
charting the field’s expanding purview across a number of related but distinct axes.5 In
brief, it suggests a starting point in American nature writing with criticism geared
toward conservation, a second wave of more diverse texts paired with more attention to
urban environments and social justice scholarship, and a third wave that pays greater
attention to postcolonial critique and more sustained attention to issues of theory. As
different critical interests found their entry points, the bibliographies of ecocriticism
opened to new genres, more diverse voices (within and across national frameworks)
and different environmental issues. One result of this is that, although ecocriticism
remains heavily invested in North American and other Anglophone writers, the Associ-
ation for the Study of Literature and Environment (ASLE)—the main ecocritical pro-
fessional organisation—also has one of the widest global networks of any literary field
of study. The wave metaphor has had its critics for some time; in their introduction to
Postcolonial Ecologies, Elizabeth DeLoughrey and George Handley vigorously query the
genealogical narratives ecocritics rehearse, noting that “ecocriticism is particularly vulner-
able to naturalizing dominant forms of environmental discourse, particularly those that do
not fundamentally engage with questions of difference, power, and privilege”.6 The wave
metaphor may be floundering altogether as new sets of issues attract scholars whose
bibliographies no longer rely on the ecocritical studies it organises; topics such as the
Anthropocene (the idea that humanity now lives in a new geological epoch defined by
the carbon-burning activities of humans), materiality and animal studies are grafting
ecocritical concerns to broader cultural and sometimes scientific studies. Ecocriticism
today appears more like a banyan tree than a series of waves—branches extend to form
alternative yet interconnected trunks.
This issue’s exploration of ecocriticism’s turn towards narrative theory, then, likewise
presents a new branch that may find its own ground from which to contribute to the

3
Glotfelty, xviii.
4
Buell, Future of Environmental Criticism, 11.
5
DeLoughrey and Handley, 14. See Buell, Future of Environmental Criticism. For discussion of ecocriticism’s third wave, see
Adamson and Slovic, “The Shoulders We Stand On.”
6
Arguably, DeLoughrey and Handley’s criticism partly involves a slide from ecocriticism as a subfield of specifically literary
and cultural studies to environmentally minded critique generally. They “recognize the need for field synopses and do not
advocate drawing a hard line between environmental and ecocritical methodologies because they have developed in
conversation and reflect intrinsically hybrid discourses” (15). The point is well observed, but it simultaneously suggests
that others have perhaps drawn this line for provisional and pragmatic reasons.
 ENGLISH STUDIES 357

whole. As the banyan metaphor suggests, ecocritical considerations of form do not grow
entirely out of nowhere; ecocritical attention to narrative as such has been scant, but not
nonexistent. Perhaps because ASLE maintains an active community of creative writers,
some of the most direct attention has been from a practice-oriented side. It is noted
science fiction writer Ursula K. Le Guin, for example, who contributed “The Carrier
Bag Theory of Fiction” to The Ecocriticism Reader, an essay that reflects on conflict’s cen-
trality within notions of plot; in terms of narrative theory, Le Guin’s question might be
recognised as an experiment in pushing past agonistic models of narrativity. Terre Satter-
field and Scott Slovic have likewise featured writers’ voices in their collection of interviews,
What’s Nature Worth?: Narrative Expressions of Environmental Values. Combining their
anthropological and literary training, Satterfield and Slovic primarily investigate narrative
as a communicative tool capable of bypassing oppositions that arise in standard delibera-
tive discourse. The twelve writers, ranging from Simon Ortiz to Alison Hawthorne
Deming to Robert Michael Pyle, complicate the interviewers’ assumptions in various
ways. Ofelia Zepeda challenges whether an overarching category like “story” can hold
meaningfully; William Kittridge suggests that narrative may not persuade readers as
much as inspire them to generate their own stories that in turn prompt more complex
judgments.
By contrast, the critical work on narrative forms has been slower in coming. This may
partly result from some of Buell’s formative early work in the field. In The Environmental
Imagination (1995), he sets out to think through what aesthetics are most conducive to
“ecocentric” ethics.7 He proposes: “But what sort of literature remains possible if we relin-
quish the myth of human apartness? It must be a literature that abandons, or at least ques-
tions, what would seem to be literature’s most basic foci: character, persona, narrative
consciousness.”8 The outcome is a preference for genres like the nature essay (and
especially, for Buell, the oeuvre of Henry David Thoreau) that embrace digression and
exposition. Buell would walk these claims back in his next major ecocritical book—“Argu-
ment can state, but narrative can actually dramatize”—yet consideration of narrative
structures has tended to stay separate from and in a subservient role relative to ethical dis-
course in much ecocritical scholarship.9
Although Buell did not go on to devote extensive attention to narrative’s power to
dramatise, Ursula Heise considers this and other narrative functions in Sense of Place
and Sense of Planet (2008). This study, which garnered intense ecocritical focus for its
argument to refocus the scale of concern from the local to the global, received less atten-
tion for the extent to which it argued for attending to the “challenges” of “narrative pat-
terns” entailed by the scalar shift.10 Narrative formats like the ramble in the nearby wild,
she contends, seldom rise to the challenge of addressing the risk scenarios posed by desta-
bilisation of geophysical forces and patterns. As her interest in “allegory and collage”
suggests, Heise considers the worldviews that different forms and media encode in
addition to what they directly dramatise. Heise repeats this call for sensitivity to narrative

7
Buell draws from ecocentrism as across disciplines with emphasis on Timothy O’Riordan’s definition, which espouses an
ethics of scale, responsibility and humility. In Buell and other sources including contemporary philosophy, the term often
gestures toward an ethical reorientation that decentres the human (Buell, Environmental Imagination, 425).
8
Ibid., 145.
9
Buell, Writing for an Endangered World, 241–2.
10
Heise, Sense of Place, 21, 22.
358 E. JAMES AND E. MOREL

structures in her afterword to Bonnie Roos and Alex Hunt’s Postcolonial Green: Environ-
mental Politics and World Narrative (2010), in which she urges ecocritical scholars to con-
sider the “question of the aesthetic”.11 She notes that ecocritical analyses “have often
tended to assess creative works most centrally in terms of whether they portray the realities
of social oppression and environmental devastation accurately, and what ideological per-
spectives they imply,” and that such assessments are undoubtedly necessary. But she also
states bluntly that “if factual accuracy, interesting political analysis, or wide public appeal
is what we look for, there are better and more straightforward places to find them than
novels and poems”. Her primary interest thus lies in the “aesthetic transformation of
the real”, which she reminds readers has “a particular potential for reshaping the individ-
ual and collective ecosocial imaginary”. Nancy Easterlin shares with Heise the interest in
what forms and media do. In her “biocultural” work that brings together evolutionary
history and cognitive science to bear on questions of literary theory, she admirably
explains the misguidedness of much ecocriticism that tries to find the genre or form
that will “palliate the soul” to “culminate in an environmentally friendly perspective”.12
Instead, she explains the interest of narrative as an “agentive force”, writing that “integrat-
ing the actions and purposes of human groups within their prescribed domain, narrative
brings into relation and coordinates sequence, causality, physical place, knowledge of
interaction with human others, and self-concept”.13 In these terms, the stakes proliferate
for studying narrative workings more widely and not only specific narrative
genres, especially as ecocritics mull over the complexities of nature-cultures and their
networks.
As Heise’s and Easterlin’s work already outlines, consideration of narrative forms
stands to sophisticate or outright complicate existing ecocritical arguments that favour
genres such as comedy, the nature essay, the pastoral, the georgic, the realist novel, the
picaresque, science fiction and posthuman cinema—among others—as ideally suited for
raising environmental consciousness.14 Such ecocritical attention to form also offers a
language for tracing the connections and disjunctures among narrative genres in ways
that may prove conducive to generating new narratives. As ecocritical scholarship invested
in narrative form limns more connections between lived environments and narrative
understanding, it may renew ecocritical attention to poetics in the etymological sense of
poiesis, “to make from”. Recently, and with good reason, scholars of ecopoetics have advo-
cated a similar turn away from searching out the most ecologically minded poetic struc-
tures and instead toward, as Sarah Nolan puts it, attention to
various situations in which individual memory, personal experience, ideology, and the limit-
ations of the sense intermingle with natural elements of experience and on how new forms
and experimentation with language can work to express these facets of experience as accu-
rately as possible.15

11
Heise, “Afterword,” 258.
12
Easterlin, 96.
13
Ibid., 139.
14
See Joseph Meeker’s “The Comic Mode” on comedy, Terry Gifford’s various publications on the pastoral, Greg Garrard’s
Ecocriticism for discussions about the pastoral and georgic, the first chapter of Rob Nixon’s Slow Violence and the Envir-
onmentalism of the Poor for a proposed eco-picaresque, Eric C. Otto’s Green Speculations: Science Fiction and Transforma-
tive Environmentalism, and Anat Pick and Guinevere Narraway’s co-edited volume Screening Nature: Cinema Beyond the
Human.
15
Nolan, 88.
 ENGLISH STUDIES 359

Heise and Easterlin might both query the final stress on accuracy, but the type of ecocri-
tical scholarship that the essays in this special issue reflects shares with ecopoetics the
attempt to move past whatever remains of the “ecocritical discomfort with language
and aesthetics” that Scott Knickerbocker identifies in his framing of ecopoetics.16 In
this sense, one way to think about an ecocriticism attentive to narrative forms may be
as an ecopoetics of narrative.
Other scholars are explicit about their pairing of ecocriticism and narrative theory. In
his groundbreaking 2013 essay “Natural Environments in Narrative Contexts: Cross-Pol-
linating Ecocriticism and Narrative Theory”, Markku Lehtimäki argues that tools devel-
oped by scholars of narrative have great ecocritical significance, as they “can be used to
explore how cultural practices pertain to the natural ecologies with which they are inter-
woven”.17 Of special interest to Lehtimäki are two key questions:
How might an author’s concern with a particular kind of ecology motivate the use of specific
forms? How can techniques for consciousness presentation … be leveraged to suggest how
characters’ experiences both shape and are shaped by their engagement with aspects of the
natural world?18

Erin James similarly makes a case for the ecocritical relevance of narratological concepts
and lexicon in The Storyworld Accord: Ecocriticism and Postcolonial Narratives (2015).
James joins the two modes of reading in what she calls “econarratology”, or the pairing
of “ecocriticism’s interest in the relationship between literature and the physical environ-
ment with narratology’s focus on the literary structures and devices by which writers
compose narratives”.19 She places special emphasis on the process of reading—on what
happens to readers when they mentally inhabit the imagined environments of narra-
tives—and positions econarratology as particularly adept at studying
the storyworlds that readers simulate and transport themselves to when reading narratives,
the correlations between such textual, imaginative worlds and the physical, extratextual
world, and the potential of the reading process to foster awareness and understanding for
different environmental imaginations and experiences.20

Alexa Weik von Mossner also is interested in what happens in the minds and bodies of
readers when they read narratives in Affective Ecologies: Empathy, Emotion, and Environ-
mental Narrative (2017). Her analyses of American texts (literary and cinematic) employ
ideas from affect studies and cognitive narratology to study readers’ emotional engage-
ment with environmental narratives, exploring, among other issues, how such narratives
can invite readers to care for human and nonhuman others subject to environmental
injustice.
This initial work offers literary critics a strong foundation by which to pair ecocriticism
and narrative theory in their own scholarship. It makes clear that narrative theory, though
its vocabulary can sometimes seem burdensome, can equip ecocritics to articulate in new
ways how environmental attitudes get conveyed. New scholarship might push this project
even further. For example, ecocritics might engage the terminology of the disnarrated,

16
Knickerbocker, 4.
17
Lehtimäki, 119.
18
Ibid., 137.
19
James, xv.
20
Ibid.
360 E. JAMES AND E. MOREL

proposed by Gerald Prince and developed by feminist narratologist Robyn Warhol.

Whereas Prince referred to “those passages in a narrative that consider what did not or
does not take place”, Warhol coins the “unnarrated” to categorise “those passages in a nar-
rative that explicitly do not tell what is supposed to have happened, foregrounding the nar-
rator’s refusal to narrate”.21 Because the reasons for this refusal could be several, she
suggests four other terms that might refine questions. An ecocritic might use these
terms to ask, for example, why more contemporary narratives don’t give attention to
toxic waste. Is toxicity so expected and banal that novels do not need to narrate it (sub-
narratable)? Is language inadequate to describe it (supranarratable)? Do novels avoid
talking about it (and whom it affects disproportionately) because of taboo (antinarrata-
ble)? Does it simply not fit into existing generic conventions (paranarratable)? All of
these categories speak to literary and cultural norms in ways ecocritics have sometimes
even claimed but that narrative theory has named via terms that can facilitate communi-
cation outside of individual ecocritical projects.
Still other new scholarship might push the pairing of ecocriticism and narrative theory
in different directions, such as towards one of ecocriticism’s most recent areas of interest,
new materialism. Spearheaded by the work of Serenella Iovino and Serpil Oppermann,
material ecocriticism extends ecocriticism’s pre-existing interests in the material by treat-
ing material as text (not simply material as represented in text). Accordingly, Iovino and
Oppermann write, “material ecocriticism traces the trajectories of natural–cultural inter-
sections by reading them as ‘material narratives’”; elsewhere, they speak of “storied
matter”.22 The material, as their analytic approach would have it, bears telling traces of
the interplaying agencies that bring it into being. But the slipperiness of narrative and
story in these usages risks undermining the strengths of literary and cultural scholars
that they appear to invoke. What differentiates narrative or story here from mere
sequence? Do these narratives have narratees—who or what would they be? There are
many questions concerning the “narrative agency of matter” that ecocritical analyses of
narrative forms might pose to further sophisticate these and similar projects animating
wide-spread interest.23
The pairing of ecocriticism and narrative theory also stands to strengthen the bridge
between critical scholarship and creative practice that has long interested scholars of litera-
ture and the environment. Many ecocritics have advocated for narrative scholarship—that
is, delivering critical arguments through narrative—as an approach that allows for remem-
bering the critic’s embeddedness in space and time. Slovic makes this point emphatically,
writing even that “ecocriticism without narrative is like stepping off the face of a moun-
tain—it’s the disoriented language of free fall”; narrative scholarship, for him, promotes
“awareness, literally, of where we stand in the world and why we’re writing”.24 Subscribing
to this view would suggest that familiarity with narrative theory would allow ecocritics to
make even more aware narrative choices. Another resonant example of narrative scholarship
is Iovino’s work on re-inhabitation of the Po Valley in Italy. She proposes “narrative reha-
bilitation” as based in place-based stories that draw attention to “values and responsibilities”
but also “envisio[n] … suitable strategies of change in the form of possible narrative

21
Prince quoted in Warhol, 220; ibid., 21.
22
Iovino and Oppermann, 6, 7 (original emphasis).
23
Ibid., 9.
24
Slovic, 35, 34.
 ENGLISH STUDIES 361

‘endings’”.25 Thinking of narrative as a practice for living in a place likely will not come as a
surprise to members of indigenous communities that have drawn on narrative epistem-
ologies for millennia before narrative theory or ecocriticism existed. As Daniel Wildcat
puts it, indigenous knowledges often consist of “collaborations … emergent from the
nature–culture nexus”; such knowledges suggest that stories are intimately tied to the
places they are told, and visa versa.26 It would be a mistake to simply superimpose narrative
theory onto indigenous texts, as narrative theory has developed primarily in a Western fra-
mework closely tied to scientific projects at times at odds with indigenous interests. Yet con-
versation among these different frameworks may nonetheless illuminate productive points
of convergence that help storytellers communicate. By putting into relief storytellers’ differ-
ent methods and purposes, the pairing of ecocriticism and narrative theory may even help
train more creative listeners.
Finally, as the essays in this special issue deftly suggest, ecocritical concepts and tra-
ditions also stand to make timely and provocative expansions of narratological work. A
major trend within narrative scholarship over the past fifteen years has been a “spatial
turn”, in which narratologists pivot from their traditional focus on classifications of nar-
rative time to consider categories of narrative spatialisation. This turn, clearly evident in
David Herman’s seminal 2001 essay “Spatial Reference in Narrative Domains”, Elana
Gomel’s Narrative Space and Time: Representing Impossible Topologies in Literature and
Marie-Laure Ryan, Kenneth Foote and Moaz Azaryahu’s new book Narrating Space/Spa-
tializing Narrative: Where Narrative Theory and Geography Meet (2016), has much to gain
from rich ecocritical considerations of the differences between place and space. Ecocritics
habitually bring attention to specific places as well as nonplaces to think about how
various ethical relationships to settings adhere, which can factor in a strand of narrative
ethics to these studies. This is especially salient because various ecocritics have explored
ways that writers known for their attention to place and space derive their intimate knowl-
edge; these include types of movement, such as walking, but also storytelling itself, raising
questions about the conveying of space through the interaction of diegetic levels. As
several contributors in this special issue demonstrate, this insight productively complicates
discussions of narrative spatialisation and setting.
Likewise, ecocritical considerations of the more-than-human world and posthuman
environments have much to add to recent narratological analyses of representations of
the nonhuman in narratives. Narrative theorists have long argued that, while not every
narrator is human, all narrators by necessity have human characteristics. But a bloom
of recent work inspired by a growing interest in the ways in which narratives can foster
empathy and care for nonhuman characters is complicating the anthropocentric assump-
tions that underlie essential narratological questions such as “Who speaks?” and “Who
sees?”. Recent essays such as Lars Bernaerts, Marco Caracciolo, Luc Herman and Bart Ver-
vaeck’s “The Storied Lives of Non-human Narrators” and David Herman’s “Narratology
Beyond the Human” question the ability of narratives to represent the experiences of non-
human others free of human interference.27 By exploring the politics of readers’ empathy
for nonhuman narrators and positioning narratives as important imaginative tools by

25
Iovino, 106.
26
Wildcat, 73.
27
See also Herman, “Storyworld/Umwelt”; and Keen, “Fast Tracks to Narrative Empathy.”
362 E. JAMES AND E. MOREL

which readers situate themselves within broad ecological networks, respectively, this scho-
larship queries how narratives can challenge readers’ conceptions of what it means to be
human and how nonhuman characters and actants express their agency. This work clearly
appeals to ecocritical conversations that pose precisely these questions.

In This Issue
The six essays in this special issue illustrate various ways that ecocriticism and narrative
theory can productively inform each other. Foregrounding issues such as narration, the
implied author, spatialisation, focalisation, progression, unreliability, second-person
address, heteroglossia and the chronotope, they showcase how narratological concepts
and vocabulary can re-energise analyses of literary and physical environments. They
also demonstrate how concepts more familiar to ecocritical scholarship, such as genre,
landscape, scale and the Anthropocene, can be helpfully rethought in light of narratologi-
cal insights. Above all, they emphasise the widespread applicability of scholarship that
combines ecocriticism and narrative theory. Ranging from Herman Melville’s Benito
Cereno to Kem Nunn’s surf novels, from oil spill memoirs to game survey reports to
graphic novels, the breadth of primary texts in these essays signals the broad appeal of eco-
critical and narratological modes of reading literature and culture, especially for texts
written in the English-speaking world.
In “‘Effective joint action’ in Wildlife Management: Ethos, Character, and Network in
Aldo Leopold’s North Central States Report”, Daniel Cryer revisits the work of an author
seminal to ecocritical scholarship to examine the narrative strategies that made it so suc-
cessful. Cryer identifies two narrative structures in particular—character narration and
progression—that helped Leopold bring together the bureaucrats, hunters, researchers,
sportsmen and game breeders that composed the disparate audience of his first book.
Cryer also examines how Leopold, via the report’s ethos and implied author, constructs
a persona not common in similar scientific writings of his time but one that would
become standard in the field for decades. Whereas Cryer’s essay uses narratological con-
cepts to re-examine the work of a writer familiar to ecocritics, Dana Phillips’ essay employs
a narratological lens to open up ecocritical scholarship to the novels of a particular writer
—and, more broadly, an entire genre—that has thus far been largely overlooked by eco-
critics. In “Nature as Noir: Kem Nunn’s California, ‘Where the Sewage Meets the Sea’”,
Phillips argues that noir narratives are particularly adept at representing today’s degraded
environments. He foregrounds the alternative model of California to that suggested by the
images of sunshine and beaches in popular discourse that appears in Nunn’s novels. Posi-
tioning Nunn’s version of the “Golden State” as violent and isolated, unpleasant and over-
developed, Phillips argues that it is the texts’ playful take on noir traditions that allow them
to so effectively represent today’s “dark” nature. Furthermore, Phillips highlights the eco-
critical usefulness of Mikhail Bakhtin’s chronotope (the time–space frame of a narrative) to
understanding how narratives represent environments.
The second pair of essays in this special issue emphasise particular environments in
their pairing of ecocritical and narratological modes of reading to suggest that certain
physical environments match well with certain narrative structures. Marta Puxan-
Oliva’s essay, “Colonial Oceanic Environments, Law and Narrative in Herman Melville’s
Benito Cereno and Juan Benet’s Sub rosa”, argues that the environmental imagination of
 ENGLISH STUDIES 363

oceans in colonial literature, dominated by the legal ambivalence of international waters,

lends itself well to narrative unreliability. Via her analysis of Melville’s and Benet’s texts,
she charts the ways in which narratives often highlight the colonial ocean’s liberation from
social, legal and political constraints via unreliable narrators. She uses this discussion of
legal ambiguity and narrative unreliability to stress the importance of historicising narra-
tive space when analysing narrative spatialisation. In “Petronarratology: A Bioregional
Approach to Oil Stories”, Bart Welling considers petroleum as both a physical substance
and a narrative. Oil, Welling argues, is an essential component of the “myth of energy” that
has allowed humans to escape their origins in the animal kingdom and build for them-
selves worlds of comfort and prosperity that disregard the laws of nature. To understand
this myth and, by extension, to better understand our relationship with the physical sub-
stance of oil and the industry built upon it, he proposes a “petronarratology”, or a mode of
reading attuned to the myth of energy’s presence in the plots, characters and storyworlds
of today’s narratives—even those that, on their surface, appear to have nothing to do with
oil. As an alternative to this destructive myth, Welling advocates for bioregional narratives
that root characters, plots and storyworlds in specific environments. He suggests that the
second-person address and heteroglossia are particularly effective strategies for represent-
ing the environment in such texts.
The final pair of essays in this special issue focus on issues of perception and narration.
In “Landscape Metaphysics: Narrative Architecture and the Focalisation of the Environ-
ment”, Taylor A. Eggan works against a tendency in ecocriticism to perceive landscape
as “bad” or imperialist and environment as essentially “good” or indigenous. Eggan
draws on the concept of focalisation, or the position by which readers “see” the events
of a narrative, to destabilise this binary. He argues that because all storyworlds are
framed and mediated representations of the world—all storyworlds are focalised
through some perceiving agent, in other words—landscape description reveals more
about how a narrative organises a particular worldview than it does about the natural
world that it represents. His analysis of focalisation in Willa Cather’s novel The Professor’s
House offers ecocritics a model by which to study the ideological and aesthetic concerns of
landscape description. David Rodriguez’s essay, “Narratorhood in the Anthropocene:
Strange Stranger as Narrator-Figure in The Road and Here”, asks how the philosophical
writing of Timothy Morton, so influential on much recent ecocritical scholarship, chal-
lenges fundamental assumptions about the necessary humanness of narrators made by
most narrative scholars. Rodriguez draws on Morton’s argument that environments are
made up of “strange strangers”, or organisms that have co-evolved to exist together in
interconnected ecosystems to the extent that they cannot be separated as autonomous
individuals, to radically rethink narration in this moment of environmental crisis. He
argues for an ethic of de-anthropomorphised reading that resists the assumption that nar-
rators must be human, instead drawing his readers’ attention to texts such as Cormac
McCarthy’s post-apocalyptic novel The Road and Richard McGuire’s graphic novel
Here that forgo clear narrating agents in favour of spatial juxtaposition and description.
Clearly, ecocriticism has continued to branch out since Bracke and Corporaal’s co-edited
issue. Clearly, too, these six essays begin to suggest rather than exhaust ecocriticism’s poss-
ible connections with narrative theory. From these things that are clear, readers of English
Studies might extrapolate one thing further: a sense of urgency in analysing the stories
that circulate about environmental conditions or relationships. Because so many of these
364 E. JAMES AND E. MOREL

stories will be told (or translated or illustrated) into/from/alongside English, this journal pre-
sents a timely venue for thinking through these and related questions and concerns. We look
forward to reading the work that continues such conversations.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

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