Acknowledging nature's agency: the ecocentric tradition in English-Canadian drama.
Date
2012-04-30
Authors
Gray, Nelson
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Abstract
While there have been numerous critical studies of English-Canadian drama, none to date has investigated portrayals of the natural world from an ecocritical perspective, paying particular attention to plays that make the relationship between human characters and the more-than-human physical world a significant part of the action. Through a series of close readings, this study considers the texts of such plays—those written in this part of the world from 1606 to 2011—with respect to what they reveal about attitudes to the natural world. After showing how depictions of nature in plays from 1606 to the late 19th century were inflected by Eurocentric attitudes and colonizing agendas, I go on to draw attention to a series of dramatic works that acknowledge the agency of the more more-than than-human physical world as an oikos or dwelling place that is fundamental to human identity. By showing the rise and development of this body of work from the 1920s to 2011, I trace the genealogy of what I characterize as an ecocentric tradition in English-Canadian drama—plays in which elements of the natural world function, not as scenic backdrops or as a pool of metaphors for exclusively human concerns, but as forces in their own right that shape and determine human actions and are, in many cases, affected by them.
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Keywords
Canadian drama, Ecocriticism and Canadian drama, Representations of Nature in Canadian drama, Ecology and Canadian drama