“A Sort of Arcadian Country”

Various branches of current ecocriticism are exploring ways of dismantling or at least diminishing dominant anthropocentric ways of evaluating the relationships among humans, the non-human world, and the literary imagination. Critical Animal Studies, Critical Plant Studies, and multispecies ecocriticism endeavour to re-evaluate the roles, even agency, of non-human life, as represented in literary works. This article unpacks the depiction of plants in three early South African travelogues (1795–1836), illuminating the sources of some enduring assumptions and iconic imageries in our relations with the natural world

Aesthetics · Anthropocentrism · Archaeology · Art · Depiction · Ecocriticism · Environmental ethics · Literature · Social science · Sociology · Ecocriticism and Environmental Literature · Geographies of human-animal interactions · History · Philosophy