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The Rise of Proto-Environmentalism in George Eliot

abstract:The “Ilfracombe” journals, “Ex Oriente Lux,” and “A Minor Prophet” register the ways in which George Eliot’s nineteenth-century nonfiction prose and poetry evidence ecotheological concerns that are proto-environmental, concerns that are also reflected in some of her novels. Employing an ecocritical methodology, this article traces the development of Eliot’s ecological literacy, beginning with her scientific field observations that incubated what would become her lifelong literary aesthetic of moral sympathy put forth in “The Natural History of German Life.” Eliot’s initial moral sympathy advanced to an ecotheological perspective made visible in both Eliot’s unpublished lyric poem “Ex Oriente Lux” and her canonic verse “A Minor Prophet.” Eliot’s early and mature writings countervailed the competing discourses of theology and science as they relate to the natural environment.