New Historicism

This school of criticism aims at reuniting a work with the historical age in which it was produced. It tries to interpret a work by identifying it with the political and cultural movements of the age to which it belongs. The central concern of the New Historicist is that every work is a product of the historic moment in which it was created.

The approaches of New Historicism is quite different from the notion of traditional Historicism. Traditional Historicism is a method of representing the history in linear manner. The series of events are based on the principle of cause and effect. The New Historicism, on the other hand is more concerned with how a particular event in history has been interpreted, and examines how the interpretation reflects the socio-political leanings of the interpreter. According to the New historicists, history can never be objective, as it depends on the person who is recording an event. A New Historicist therefore studies a text against the background of the historical age. It is the method of interpretation based on the parallel reading of literary as well as non literary texts based on the same historical period.

In Renaissance Self-fashioning: from more to Shakespeare (1980), Stephen Greenblatt introduces the term new historicism to refer to a reading practice, which takes the historical, cultural contexts of a text in connection with the production of its meaning. Such a reading strategy is evolved as a reaction against the close readings of New Criticism and Deconstruction, which completely rejected the historicity of the text.

Louis Montrose defines New Historicism as “a reciprocal concern with the historicity of the texts and the textuality of history”, emphasising the role of literature as a historically situated object and history as a linguistic construct. In fact, both are representation or discourses and neither one is closer to the ‘truth’.

Ecofeminism

Ecofeminism examines literary and cultural texts for the manner in which they represent feminized nature and naturalised femininity and thereby suggest that both nature and women have certain essential characteristics, which justifies the domination of both by men.

 As a branch of feminism it comprehends environmentalism and the relationship between women and the earth, as foundational to its analysis and practice. Ecofeminist thinkers draw on the concept of gender to analyse the relationships between humans and the natural world.

The term was coined by the French writer  Francoise d’Eaubonne. Ecofeminist theory asserts a feminist perspective of Green Politics (a political ideology that aims at fostering an ecologically sustainable society rooted in environmentalism, non-violence and social justice) that calls for an egalitarian, collaborative society in which there is no one dominant group.

Ecofeminism can be classified into two: Radical Ecofeminism and Cultural Ecofeminism. one of the assumptions of Radical Ecofeminism is that the dominant patriarchal society associates nature and women in order to degrade both. in fact, in its emergence, ecofeminism tends to be radical by revealing the practices of patriarchal domination against nature and women. The radical feminists target the historical and cultural backgrounds that connect with feminine and nature with negative and inferior attributes. while, men have been elevated as capable of establishing order. Such a socio-economic formation easily enable the exploitation of women and nature for cheap labour and resources.

Cultural Ecofeminism, on the other hand, promotes an associaation between women and the environment by focusing on the more intimate and organic relationship between them. As per the anthropologically assigned gender roles, women are nurturers of family and providers of food. By their biology, they are the part of the reproductive mechanism of nature, in the form of pregnancy. Cultural Ecofeminism also has roots in nature based religions, goddess and nature worship.

Some of the new branches of ecofeminism are Vegetarian Ecofeminism, Materialist Ecofeminism, and Spiritualist Ecofeminism. Observing that omitting animals from feminist and ecofeminist actually contradicts the real spirit of the movement. Vegetarian Ecofeminism juxtaposes sympathy, ethics and action in the analysis of culture and politics, and come with slogans like "animals are friends , not food", "I think therefore I am vegan" and so on. Materialist Ecofeminism connects institutions such as labor,power and property as the source of domination over women and nature. where as in the Spiritualist Ecofeminism the importance completely lies on women and nature. Vandana Shiva for example glorifies the vedic period of Indian history.

According to Francoise d’Eaubonne  in her book Le Féminisme ou la Mort (1974), ecofeminism relates the oppression and domination of all marginalized groups (women, people of color, children, the poor) to the oppression and domination of nature (animals, land, water, air, etc.). In the book, the author argues that oppression, domination, exploitation, and  colonization from the western patriarchal society  has directly caused absolute environmental damages.  Francoise d’Eaubonne  was an activist and organizer, and her writing encouraged the eradication of all social injustice, not just injustice against women and the environment.

This tradition includes a number of influential texts including: Women and Nature(1978)  by Sussan Griffin, The Death of Nature(1980) by Carolyn Merchant and Gyn/Ecology (1978) by Mary Daly. From these texts feminist activism of the 1980s linked ideas of ecology and the environment.