The Ecocritical Stakes of French Poetry from the Industrial Era

Ecocriticism explores the relationship between cultural production and its environment. The evolution of the field since the 1970s has been fuelled by growing concern about the reifying attitude of humanity towards nature, involving debates about sustainability and animal welfare. The environmental awareness spurring these theoretical advancements germinated in the wake of the Industrial Revolution, as natural scientists began to realize that the body was affected by the quality of its surroundings. In Care Crosses the River, Hans Blumenberg notes that ‘the concept that you are what you eat appeared to the nineteenth century as one of the great moments of sobering-up during the descent from the heights of idealism’ (2010: 13). Post-Enlightenment science relating to the environment recognized that the flourishing of societies could not continue in a vacuum, and began to redress the perception of the non-human world as a sphere of alterity. The enmeshment of humanity in food chains and ecosystemic networks was clarified by biological and geophysical research that culminated in the emergence of ecology as a field of study in the latter half of the nineteenth century. More recently, the impetus to contemplate environmental issues and the imbalance in human–nature relations has been augmented by climatic tumult linked to human actions. In The Truth of Ecology, Dana Philips asserts that ‘understanding of the environment has come about, in large part, through the disruption of nature by agriculture and industrialism, and the concomitant rise of science. Without environmental crisis, in other words, there would be no environmental imagination’ (2003: 183). On account of the increasing manipulation of nature by humanity, the anthropocene marks a watershed in the geological timescale of the Earth. Ecocritics have responded to the changing nature of the world by elaborating interdisciplinary models for studying the ways in which cultural production relates to its environment. Ecocriticism delves into the complexity of human–nature relations through analysis of works suffused by environmental themes. Chiming with Theodor Adorno’s assertion in Aesthetic Theory that ‘in their antithetical opposition, man and nature are dependent on each other’ (1984: 91), ecocritics highlight the fundamental importance of nature in human existence. The environment, no longer fixed or constructed according to an anthropocentric perspective, is envisioned as a complex web of