Green Literature

Crane, Walter. Red Riding Hood. 1875. Nature and culture are intertwined but traditionally, in literature, we see them in binary opposition to one another (Adler, 2014). According to ecocritical theorist Peter Barry, however, there exists a "gray area" in between the two. In this space, nature and culture coexist and interact. Barry argues that "for the ecocritic, nature really exists, out there beyond ourselves, not needing to be ironized as a concept, but actually present as an entity which affects us, and which we can affect, perhaps fatally, if we mistreat it". Thus, in literature, we can find examples of nature not as a set of metaphorical meanings, but as reflections of the natural world. By analyzing these representations, what we are left with are actual depictions of the relationship between humans and nature. This is where fairy tales come into play. In fairy tales the story often begins when the main character leaves the safety of its home, i...

Poisoned air, rivers, seas and land - everything is begging for help, for protection.  Our future and the future of our children depend on the solution of the current environmental situation. All these changes occurring in nature and the surrounding world have been always reflected in the literature.  A number of works by such Russian modern writers as Valentin Rasputin, Victor Astafev, Sergey Zalygin and others are devoted to this problem. Now we want to turn to Rasputin's novel “Farewell to Matyora” ( Прощание с Матерой ), which raises the issue of the extinction of villages. Grandma Daria, the main heroine, receives the news that the village of Matyora where she was born will be destroyed the following spring. A dam is being built on the river Angara and the village will be flooded.  Daria resists the decision and, by all means, protects her old hut, where her great-grandfather and grandfather lived, where every log was not only her, but also her a...

How precious our world we live in! There are so many places that a traveller can take a delight in. For example, large bodies of water covering the Earth: the sea, oceans, lakes, rivers, and other water reservoirs. To some extension, this part of nature encapsulates some healing qualities: for instance, when a person is on the seaside, he is mentally relaxing and is forgetting about his daily routine; he is enjoying the vastness of the sea. The sea is mysterious, unsteady, and immense; it commoves the one’s soul. In such a way, Charles Strickland - the character of Somerset Maugham’s The Moon and Sixpence - founds himself in Tahiti: the artist is encouraged by the surroundings that ‘offer the imagination something new and strange’ (Maugham 177). Apart from Charles Strickland, the narrator of the novel is also astonished by what he sees and feels: the sea, which is calm and blue; the Pacific Ocean itself, a journey upon which creates the adventurous feeling; and the bracing air (Mau...

One way nature is portrayed in literature is through epic poems that describe how our world came about. In Estonian folkore there is a book called ''Kalevipoeg'' that is in this genre. In Estonia, specifically in Tallinn, there is a lake called Ülemiste and a passage in Kalevipoeg describes how this lake appeared. A woman named Linda was grieving over the death of her man, whose name was Kalev. While burying him under some stones Linda got tired and accidentally dropped one of the boulders. She was too exhausted to pick it back up so she sat on it and started crying. Her sadness was so big and she cried for so long that her tears formed the Ülemiste lake. In real life you can even see the two big stones in the lake that Linda supposedly cried on and they are called the Lindakivi. Besides this, the rocks Linda was burying Kalev under formed Tõnismägi, a place that also exists in real life.  Silmalauge vesi valgus Laiaks loiguks lagedalle, Loigust tõusis ti...