Word.ws English Dictionary

ecocriticism

ecocriticism noun: the interdisciplinary study of literature and ecology.

Noun

ecocriticism (usually uncountable, plural ecocriticisms)

  1. (usually) The interdisciplinary study of literature and ecology.
    • A chapter on North Woods writers is an ideal project in which to engage the fundamental issues of ecocriticism.1998, Patrick D Murphy, Terry Gifford, Katsunori Yamazato, Literature of nature: an international sourcebook
    • The emergence of ecocriticism as a distinct field of inquiry parallels the reemergence of literary critic as cultural activist […]2003, Roger Thompson, J Scott Bryson, Twentieth-century American nature writers: prose

Examples of ecocriticism in a sentence

  • In this light, the current volume is a work of ecocriticism, although not all the contributors would wish to define themselves first and foremost as ecocritics.2007, Fiona Becket, Terry Gifford, Culture, creativity and environment: new environmentalist criticism:
  • Serpil Opperman writes that ecocriticism proposes “that we can read the world as matter endowed with stories.”2020, Bridgitte Barclay, “My Heart Slowly Cracks”, in Jonathan Elmore, editor, Fiction and the Sixth Mass Extinction, Rowman & Littlefield...

Forms of ecocriticism

pluralecocriticisms

Origin of ecocriticism

From eco- + criticism.

Words formed from ecocriticism

Questions about ecocriticism

What does ecocriticism mean?
Ecocriticism means the interdisciplinary study of literature and ecology.
How do you use ecocriticism in a sentence?
In this light, the current volume is a work of ecocriticism, although not all the contributors would wish to define themselves first and foremost as ecocritics.
What part of speech is ecocriticism?
Ecocriticism is a noun.
What is the plural of ecocriticism?
The plural of ecocriticism is ecocriticisms.

Words near ecocriticism in the dictionary

  1. ecocrises
  2. ecocrisis
  3. ecocritic
  4. ecocritical
  5. ecocritically
  6. ecocriticism
  7. ecocriticisms
  8. ecocritics
  9. ecocultural
  10. ecoculturally
  11. ecoculture

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: ecocriticism (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Cite this entry: “ecocriticism.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/ecocriticism. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.