Ecocriticism is a methodological approach to literary and cultural criticism that takes “the environment” as its primary focus. While ecocriticism began in the 1990s, it has roots in nature writing, environmental philosophy, and environmental history. Some ground-breaking texts that are staples of any American ecocritic’s diet include Roderick Nash’s Wilderness and the American Mind, Henry Nash Smith’s Virgin Land: American West as Symbol and Myth and Annette Kolodny's The Lay of the Land.

The editors of the Ecocriticism Reader define ecocriticism as follows:
"all ecological criticism shares the fundamental premise that human culture is connected to the physical world, affecting it and affected by it. Ecocriticism takes as its subject the interconnections between nature and culture, specifically the cultural artifacts of languages and literature, As a critical stance, it has one foot in literature and the other on land; as a theoretical discourse, it negotiates between the human and the non-human.

(see “Questions Posed by Ecocriticism”; see also Literature of the Environment)