Journals such as The North Dakota Quarterly , The Indiana Review , The Georgia Review , and others have published special issues on literature and the environment. This year, groups that meet annually to discuss the literature of Faulkner and Hemingway have adopted the natural world as their theme. Still, nobody is willing to pin down just what ecocriticism is. Very broadly, scholars say that it adds place to the categories of race, class, and gender used to analyze literature. The diversity stems at least in part from the different routes that literary critics have traveled to ecocriticism.
Some literary critics see their role as raising public awareness of environmental issues.
Many of these scholars were environmental activists before they become ecocritics. Avid backpackers have transferred their love of the outdoors to appreciation of its depiction in literature. Others have responded to the growing interest among literary scholars in studying non-fiction. Perhaps most important, scholars have been galvanized by the contemporary renaissance in nature writing among such authors as Annie Dillard, Barry Lopez, Terry Tempest Williams, and many more. A number of literary critics also say that ecocriticism represents a reaction to the heady theorizing of the 1980s and 90s.