Finch-Race, Daniel A./Posthumus, Stephanie (eds.): French Ecocriticism. From the Early Modern Period to the Twenty-First Century, 296 pp., Lang, Berlin u. a. 2017.

Ecocriticism is a fairly recent academic outgrowth of 1960s environmentalism. Stretching it across six centuries as a practice all the way back to the early modern period hence might confuse the contemporary reader. At least if one considers ecocriticism from a disciplinary point of view rather than the field’s subject-matter—a critical concern for the human treatment of the physical, nonhuman environment. From the latter point of view, the volume revisits intriguingly how people throughout Modernity were pre-occupied with their relationship to their natural environment in one way or another, if under different circumstances at various historical moments. Indeed, not even worry about the consequences of human interference with the nonhuman environment can be restricted to the present, as Jeff Persels’ and Karen Quandt’s contributions in this volume exemplify.

Such historical opening up of ecocriticism is a very welcome and necessary step, and reflects current trends in the field that in turn seem themselves driven by the growing body of research into environmental issues. The more we explore human relationships with the nonhuman world, the more we come to realize how closely interrelated culture and nature have always been. French Ecocriticism proves as much a product of as well as a fine example for such a growing awareness. More importantly still, the volume’s chapters continue a more detailed and nuanced ecocritical reevaluation of Modernity. The post-Descartes world and subject features therein not only as backdrop that inevitably had to lead to the ecological mess we currently find ourselves in. Instead, the contributions illustrate how instances of disruption and potentially resistance against the exploitative and destructive appropriation of nature were also produced constantly throughout Modernity.

Through their historical view, the editors intend to challenge the reluctance of contemporary French cultural studies to adopt political forms of criticism for fear of devaluating the aesthetic, formal and stylistic aspects of cultural production by revealing and tracing a significant yet localized brand of French ecocriticism that would have always permeated French culture. Given the highly political forms of criticism that have originated in France and the degree to which they influence current cultural inquiries, I find this argument of marginalization even within a strictly French intellectual context not entirely convincing. Instead, the book’s specific national focus rightly exposes the pervasive dominance of Anglophone cultural production in the field of ecocriticism and clarifies impressively what we are missing out on in such overemphasizing of the Anglophone world.

The volume’s content is arranged chronologically, with chapters divided along the fault lines of centuries. Reaching from as far back as the French religious wars of the sixteenth century through to current ecopoetics of the twenty-first century, the selection concludes with a chapter exploring the volume’s unifying theme of a specific French approach and dimension of écocritique. In between, the reader encounters a varied assortment of texts, from polemical and didactic textbooks of the sixteenth century via works of fiction and poetry by Michel de Montaigne, Victor Hugo, Émile Zola and Arthur Rimbaud to the philosophical texts of Michel Serres and film-work by Jean-Claude Rousseau alongside writings of Michel Houllebecq. Unfortunately only three of the papers engage with the work of female authors: Marie Krysinska, Marguerite Yourcenar and Sylvain Tesson. All contributions make excellent and intriguing ecocritical points about their material, while the introduction helpfully fills in the historical spaces between the essays that necessarily appear in a discussion that spans a period of almost six hundred years.

Although the papers engage a variety of materials, the concept of ecocriticism with which the volume operates nevertheless remains somewhat conservative through both its focus on and anchorage in literary production and analysis. Such “conservatism” is not a problem in itself, of course, but it does defy—at least to some degree—the ongoing progression of ecocriticism beyond a strictly literary perspective. Moreover, while Posthumus’ concluding chapter tries to offer up a specifically French approach to écocritique, identifying it within the contributions assembled in this publication remains difficult. Neither the perspectives the authors take nor the material they engage with strike me as so different from non-French work that they would qualify as an approach in themselves. Instead, French Ecocriticism provides a highly readable and relevant environmentally focused “sample of five hundred years of French literature and culture” (p. 14).

Such minor qualifications do not undermine the important and intriguing work that this volume, including Posthumus’ chapter, is doing, however, nor do I intend to reject the thesis of a French ecocriticism, something that I am hardly qualified to do. The contributions make engagingly visible what French authors have to contribute to an ecocriticism that intends to do both global and local justice to understanding the relationship between culture and nature, the human and the nonhuman, cultural products and their non-cultural materials and sediments. Through the volume’s broad historical view, ecocriticism becomes indeed separated, at least partially, from its identification with our current experience of an environmental crisis, while ecocriticism’s manifestation in the second half of the twentieth century takes on the shape of a remembrance of the environment that was lost for a comparatively short period from the late nineteenth to the middle of the twentieth century. The recovery of this cultural memory remains an ongoing project. Daniel A. Finch-Race and Stephanie Posthumus have provided us with an invaluable contribution to this project.