‘We’ll build in sonnets pretty rooms’: Early Modern Literary Studies, the ‘Spatial Turn’ and Ecocriticism

Early modern writers (such as John Donne) were fascinated by space: literary, textual, urban, rural, global and cosmic. This fascination is reflected in a growing interest in the concept of space in early modern literary studies. Encompassing literature that depicts both rural and urban environments this has been called the ‘spatial turn’. Although it developed from an historicist approach to literature the spatial turn shares common concerns with ecocriticism such as a commitment to interdisciplinary studies and an interest in the relationship of literature to its environment. Historicist critics are most concerned with the cultural environment while ecocritics are interested in the natural world and the ways in which literary texts express humanity’s relationship with it. Examining the development of ecocriticism from its inception in the 1990s reveals productive cross‐fertilisation between the two critical approaches. Ecocritics perceive the 16th and 17th centuries as the period when representations of humanity’s relationship with the natural world changed from a model of unity to one of separation, leading directly to the environmental degradation of the earth and the present ecological crisis. The combination of an ecocritica perspective with historicist readings resonates with the preoccupations of early modern writers such as Ben Jonson, Robert Herrick and William Shakespeare and (in particular) gives fresh insights into the genre of pastoral and the relationship between culture/art and nature.