ABSTRACT

This chapter argues that the question of the social impact of environmental literature should be of vital importance to ecocritics, and that the most reliable way to study that question is to employ experimental methods. Having laid out the potential scholarly and practical benefits of this kind of approach, which it calls experimental ecocriticism, the chapter then proceeds to explain its methodology. In doing so, it discusses several experimental studies on the influence of narratives on attitudes toward animals that the author of the chapter conducted with the help of specialists in literary history, social psychology, and biological anthropology.