Moral Dilemmas and the Environment: The Hebrew Bible and the Literature of Industry

Moral dilemmas are central in the literary genre of protest against the effects of industry, particularly in Romantic literature and “Condition of England” novels. Writers from the time of the Industrial Revolution to the present – William Blake, Elizabeth Gaskell, Charles Dickens, Emile Zola, Henrik Ibsen, Anton Chekhov, T.S. Eliot and John Steinbeck – follow the Bible in presenting environmental pollution and calamity in moral terms, and as a consequence of human agency. Dire implications for the environment are equally evident in literature of national rivalry and the misanthropic tradition.