• 1 Oona Frawley, Irish Pastoral: Nostalgia and Twentieth-Century Irish Literature, Dublin, Irish Acade (...)
• 2 Tim Wenzell, Emerald Green: An Ecocritical Study of Irish Literature, Cambridge, Cambridge Scholars (...)
• 3 See for instance Eóin Flannery, “Ireland and Ecocriticism: An Introduction” in the special issue of (...)

2In this context of growing environmental concern, while the successive governments’ neoliberal agenda continues unabated, the past decade has seen a proliferation of academic works examining Irish cultural production from an ecocritical perspective. First heralded by Oona Frawley’s study of Irish pastoral in the 20^th century1, then spurred by American scholars already familiar with the environmental humanities2, Irish ecocritical studies have now taken hold in the country’s academic circles3. The present issue of Études irlandaises brings together Irish, French and international scholars to contribute to what has become a globally thriving academic debate.

• 4 Flann O’Brien / Myles na gCopaleen famously recycled this offensive stereotype in his 1942 satirica (...)
• 5 Tim Robinson, Connemara, Listening to the Wind, London, Penguin, 2006, p. 55.
• 6 See among many others Christophe Gillissen, “Charles Trevelyan, John Mitchel and the Historiography (...)

3Historically, two conflicting visions of Irish nature coexist. On the one hand, a peaceful Irish pastoralism grounded in (credulous) Catholicism and tinged with Celtic spirituality: such perception of domesticated nature culminates in the De Valeran nationalist ideal of cosy homesteads, grazing fields and comely maidens – illustrated in John Ford’s 1952 film The Quiet Man. On the other hand, the classic colonial representation paints simian-looking savages impervious to the civilizing forces of progress4 and inhabiting a wilderness – the inhospitable landscape of the bogs which, ironically, results from thousands of years of human presence5. Such threatening nature occasionally turns against men – for their sins, as evangelical providentialists conveniently understood the Great Irish Famine6. Arguably, both stereotypes are the opposite sides of a single vision of Ireland as naturalized, or essentialized, generated by the colonial process but appropriated by the newly independent nation.

• 7 See for instance Brian Friel’s acclaimed 1980 play Translations (London, Faber and Faber, 2012), an (...)
• 8 Hilary Tovey, “Environmentalism in Ireland: Two Versions of Development and Modernity”, Internation (...)

4Essentialist tropes positing Ireland as a refuge of authenticity and wilderness in the Western world have endured from the colonizer’s naturalizing discourse since the Norman era, to the surge of the nature tourism industry in Victorian time, and to British conservationism, thus identifying a specific attitude towards Irish nature with the colonizing process. The colonizer went through a symbolic process of dehumanization in order to reduce natives to mere parts of the landscape – a landscape whose ownership by the colonizer was posited as a natural process of history. The confiscation of natural and agricultural resources and the alienation of the native cultural heritage were epitomized by the brutal overhaul of toponymy and subsequent destruction of the symbiotic link between native place and native language7, thereafter fantasized by nationalist mythology. It is therefore no surprise that the early ecological activism of 1970s Ireland largely considered environmental degradations in terms of damages inflicted by outsiders and denounced the globalized avatars of British capitalist imperialism rather than the policies implemented at home8.

• 9 Frank Mitchell, Michael Ryan, Reading the Irish Landscape, Dublin, Town House, 1997; Francis Ludlow (...)
• 10 See for instance Shepard Krech III’s The Ecological Indian: Myth and History, New York, Norton, 199 (...)
• 11 As Declan Kiberd famously quipped: “If England had never existed, the Irish would have been rather (...)

5The issue of colonization has long dominated Irish Studies. Environmental debates intersect with it, albeit not in entirely predictable ways. Colonization has affected the geographical landscape of the country, from the massive deforestation that accompanied Elizabethan plantations to the transformation of Ireland into Britain’s breadbasket in the first half of the 19^th century9. However, colonization cannot be considered as shorthand for univocal environmental destruction, following the stereotype used elsewhere of the “ecological native”10. The mutual definition of England and Ireland in terms of each other under the colonial relationship11 meant that, given England’s status as the industrial leader of the world from the mid-18^th to the early 20^th century, Ireland had to be conceived of as nature. Ireland therefore played a great part in how nature was conceptualized in an Anglocentric perspective. Early English conservationism was thus transplanted in Ireland with a colonial zeal that paradoxically played against the interests of the Irish environment, as John Feehan remarked as early as 1997:

• 13 See Rob Kitchin, Cian O’Callaghan, Mark Boyle, Justin Gleeson, Karen Keaveney, “Placing Neoliberali (...)

6Today, Ireland’s carefully managed representation of the environment, to bolster tourism and attract foreign investors, aims to hide the very real damage done by neoliberal economic policies to Irish landscapes and wildlife, from urban sprawl to water pollution and the loss of natural habitats. Ireland’s poor environmental record can no longer be read as a perverse legacy of colonization, all the more so as the very actors of self-inflicted environmental damage are often those who recycle postcolonial arguments13.

• 14 The concept is borrowed from historian Theodore Roszak. See Ecopsychology: Restoring the Earth, Hea (...)

7Irish artistic and cultural production has become a fertile ground for critical reflection on Ireland’s ambiguous relationship with its “nature”, understood as a form of congruence between its identity and its environment. Thus the mythical status of the West, the central question of land ownership but also the puzzling under-representation of the sea given Ireland’s insular status constitute so many aspects of a national ecopsychology that transpire in artistic productions14. How might we therefore develop an adequate theoretical and critical apparatus to describe the specific nature of the Irish relationship to the environment, while avoiding both essentialist and constructivist pitfalls? First, Irish Studies critics must be aware of the temptation to naturalize Ireland in variously detectable ways. The issue at stake is the relationship between Ireland’s nature, defined and romanticized from the outside, and its environment, the natural and non-natural surroundings of human societies. Nature tends to evoke landscapes, bucolic aesthetics and nostalgic longing. The environment raises directly concrete issues such as urban planning and the future of extractive industries. Both terms have been criticized and it can indeed be argued that neither satisfactorily accounts for the relationship between human consciousness, behaviour and culture and the non-human world. Both set man apart from the rest of the known world.

• 15 This is Clément Rosset’s central thesis in his book L’anti-nature: éléments pour une philosophie tr (...)
• 16 David R. Keller, “Deep Ecology”, in Encyclopedia of Environmental Ethics and Philosophy, John Baird (...)

8Nature, Descartes’ res extensa, is what the cogito has extracted itself from. This absolute distinction makes it easy for postmodern or deconstructivist thinkers to show that nature is first and foremost an idea, a cultural creation which veils the world (understood as a chaotic, “idiotic” and unattainable real) and ensures that it remains always beyond human reach15. The environment also betrays an anthropocentric bias by placing human perceptions and needs at the centre of its ecological vision. It has been called into question by deep ecologists who have tried to reclaim the idea of nature and to offer a different understanding of man’s place in it16. On the other hand, the deep ecology movement falls in the opposite trap by ignoring the crucially social and historical dimension that links social and economic struggles to environmental crises past and present. Ecocriticism is part of a critical current that seeks to understand the relationship between human cultural productions and the world “out there” in terms that move beyond mere representationalism.

• 17 Loretta Johnson, “Greening the Library: The Fundamentals and Future of Ecocriticism”, Choice, vol.  (...)
• 18 Cheryll Glotfelty, “Introduction: Literary Studies in an Age of Environmental Crisis", in The Ecocr (...)
• 19 Lawrence Buell, The Future of Environmental Criticism: Environmental Crisis and Literary Imaginatio (...)

9Defined as “a field of literary studies that addresses how humans relate to non-human nature or the environment in literature”17, ecocriticism allows for a reading of all literary productions through this perspective, including those not overtly concerned with environmental issues but which reflect a specific understanding of our relationship with the natural world. Besides literature, however, it is our contention that the discipline is relevant to a wider range of discourses and attitudes to the environment, including the visual arts and social and economic discourses addressing, or impacting, the natural environment. Cheryll Glotfelty has shown how ecocritical studies share the awareness that “we have reached the age of environmental limits, a time when the consequences of human actions are damaging the planet’s basic life support systems. Either we change our ways or we face global catastrophe […]”18. Awareness, then, is a common trait of ecocritical approaches to cultural and social productions. Another common feature is the fact that, as Lawrence Buell explains, environmental criticism (a term better suited to the variety of issues under examination than the reductive “ecocriticism”) is issue-driven rather than method-driven, uniting a wide range of critical practices over the common awareness of current environmental crises19. As the so-called second-wave ecocriticism of the late 20^th century considered iconic texts such as Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962) and Vandana Shiva’s Staying Alive: Women, Ecology and Survival in India (1988), the discipline paralleled the rise of social environmental movements across late-capitalist countries and postcolonial countries in the past decades.

• 20 Karen Barad, “Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter”, (...)
• 21 See Bill Brown’s introduction to the issue of PMLA he edited on the topic (Bill Brown, “Introductio (...)
• 22 “Géocritique” is a term coined by French critic Bertrand Westphal in his book La géocritique: réel, (...)
• 23 See in particular Material Ecocriticism, Serpil Oppermann, Serenella Iovino (eds.), Bloomington, In (...)

10Environmental criticism should not be seen as monolithic or programmatic. It overlaps with issues of imperialism, postcolonialism, race and class, and the politics of place. It is also the locus of passionate and necessary debate, as the succession of “waves” within the movement shows. Nor does it stand isolated in the critical landscape: environmental criticism is part of a wider theoretical tendency to rehabilitate the material world, the increasingly shared recognition that, as new materialist physicist-cum-philosopher Karen Barad puts it, “language has been granted too much power”20. It is indeed time to move beyond an understanding of language as ultimately self-sufficient and self-referential, and the various recent “turns” in academic inquiry such as the spatial, material, and ethical turns, which all aim to rehabilitate the outside world, are congruent with environmental criticism. New materialisms, textual materialism21 or geocriticism22 all encourage the literary and cultural critic to gain a precise understanding of how the natural world works by borrowing insights from geography, the life sciences and quantum physics. It can therefore be expected to generate much stimulating cross-disciplinary discussion. In this respect, material ecocriticism, which invites us to see the non-human world as an assemblage of narratives, thus generating a sense of continuity, or co-construction, between matter and culture, is a particularly exciting development to follow23.

• 24 Seamus Heaney, “Known World”, in Electric Light, London, Faber and Faber, 2001, p. 22.
• 25 Garrett Carr, The Rule of The Land: Walking Ireland’s Border, London, Faber and Faber, 2017.

14The next contributions to this volume focus on questions of nature and the material environment in literary and visual artworks, thus grappling with Seamus Heaney’s question “How does the real get into the made-up?”24. The idea that art should probe the link between form and material reality interrogates the arbitrariness of the sign and the materiality of the work of art itself, something which is especially perceptible in artistic performance or in recent travel diaries such as Garrett Carr’s The Rule of the Land25. As such, novels, poems or paintings, beyond their mimetic function of representation, ask if literature and the arts can make Ireland a habitable place.