Simon C. Estok. 2011. Ecocriticism and Shakespeare: Reading Ecophobia.

Abstract

This historically grounded book expands the ecocritical vocabulary of current scholarship by dialling in ecophobia, defined here as “a generalised fear or contempt for the natural world and its inhabitants” (4), expressed through human’s need to control nature. Chapter 1 argues that ecophobia can and should be aligned with other critical approaches, including “feminism, queer theory, critical racial theory, food studies, cultural anthropology, ecopsychology, post-structuralism, and deconstruction” (23) because ecocriticism is central to each one. The rest of the book proceeds to demonstrate how this can be done through close readings of a range of Shakespearean plays.