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Humankind has always been fascinated by the world in which it finds itself, and puzzled by its relations to it. Today that fascination is often expressed in what is now called ‘green’ terms, reflecting concerns about the non-human natural world, puzzlement about how we relate to it, and anxiety about what we, as humans, are doing to it. So-called green or eco-criticism acknowledges this concern. This book reaches back and offers new readings of English texts, both known and unfamiliar, informed by eco-criticism. After considering general issues pertaining to green criticism, it moves on to a series of individual chapters arranged by theme (earth, trees, wilds, sea, gardens and fields) that provide individual close readings of selections from such familiar texts as Malory's Morte D'Arthur, Chaucer's Knight's and Franklin's Tales, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and Langland's Piers Plowman. These discussions are contextualized by considering them alongside hitherto marginalized texts such as lyrics, Patience and the romance Sir Orfeo. The result is a study that reinvigorates our customary reading of late Middle English literary texts while also allowing us to reflect upon the vibrant new school of eco-criticism itself.

Chaucer is no botanist. Typically, flowers enter his poetry as similes for female beauty (the Knight’s Emelye), more rarely as indiscriminate clusters of colour signalling courtly landscapes (Parlement of Fowls, Book of the Duchess). The daisy of the Prologue to The Legend of Good Women is an exception; venerated by Chaucer’s dream-persona, it receives accurate, detailed description before being personified in his dream as Alcestis. Chaucer is by no means unique in this superficial approach to flowers: intriguingly, flowers in general gain only a fleeting mention under trees in Isidore of Seville’s influential Etymologies XVII.vi.21, where we learn flores are so named because they ‘quickly drop [defluere] from trees.’ However, following Michael Marder, superficiality offers a useful paradigm for thinking with plants. Dilettantism becomes attention, enabling associations that privilege present over past – flowers over roots. Fleeting flowers seem scarcely available to us as subjects of empathy, let alone rights or justice: arguably more remote even than trees, they pose different questions to ecologically invested critics, while the ease with which they are (superficially) understood offers clues to how literary critics may join debates about the way green spaces and entities are valued.

Humankind has always been fascinated by the world in which it finds itself, and puzzled by its relations to it. Today that fascination is often expressed in what is now called ‘green’ terms, reflecting concerns about the non-human natural world, puzzlement about how we relate to it, and anxiety about what we, as humans, are doing to it. So called green or eco-criticism acknowledges this concern. Greenery reaches back and offers new readings of English texts, both known and unfamiliar, informed by eco-criticism. After considering general issues pertaining to green criticism, Greenery moves on to a series of individual chapters arranged by theme (earth, trees, wilds, sea, gardens and fields) which provide individual close readings of selections from such familiar texts as Malory’s Morte D’Arthur, Chaucer’s Knight’s and Franklin’s Tales, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and Langland’s Piers Plowman. These discussions are contextualized by considering them alongside hitherto marginalized texts such as lyrics, Patience and the romance Sir Orfeo. The result is a study which reinvigorates our customary reading of late Middle English literary texts while also allows us to reflect upon the vibrant new school of eco-criticism itself.

This brief discussion of Sir Gawain's journey across the Wirral seeks to open up questions of how literature 'thinks' landscape and how that might feed into eco-critical debates. It deals with lost geographies and invented ones, and touches on notions of the otherworld as underpinning our responses to this one.

This chapter focuses on the sea and coast, which appears to defy expression. It notes that descriptions of the sea are usually lacking in the very texts one might expect to find them. It then determines that much of one's view of the sea depends both imaginatively and literally on having a coast from which to view it. It shows that the effects of the sea on writers who live close to it are not always beneficial and studies peoples' highly ambiguous relations with the sea.

This chapter studies the term ‘earth’ and its attendant associations. It determines that there is a myriad of entries for this short word, which indicates that it offers many opportunities for the kind of allusive and elusive poetry one can find in lyrics. This chapter is concerned mostly with the readings of medieval English lyrics and their use of the term ‘earth’.

This chapter introduces present green literary criticism that is used on late medieval texts and ecocritical literary study. It first tries to define the term ecocriticism and then addresses the issue of anthropocentrism. This chapter also tries to show an analogy between ecosystems and literary analysis, and takes a look at several texts that have been subjected to green criticism.