Chapter 3 - Genre and the question of non-fiction

Summary

Environmental non-fiction in the tradition of Thoreau remains a major if hardly exclusive concern of twenty-first-century ecocriticism. To open any issue of Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and the Environment, the journal of the Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment, is to still find at least as many studies of creative non-fiction as of the novel and poetry. More than in elements of romantic politics, it is in questions of genre that environmental non-fiction challenges the agenda of literary studies. It does not so much ‘question the canon’ of received literature as address presuppositions that are arguably deeper than choices as to which specific literary texts ‘belong in the canon’ or not. These concern the hierarchy of genres of writing. Robert L. Root writes:

For a long time introductory literature courses and creative writing programs have divided literature into three genres – fiction, poetry, and drama. Although nonfiction as a literary form has been around for a very long time, in creative writing communities it is often seen as a vehicle for the discussion of fiction and poetry rather than an equivalent artistic outlet.

Robert Root's suggested name for creative non-fiction, the ‘fourth genre’ (247), never caught on. The lack of status enjoyed by explicit non-fiction, though a form as old as Herodotus, reflects perhaps the continuing but anachronistic power of the romantic idealisation of creativity in relation to the other genres.