One of the most significant developments in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century has been the emergence of ecocriticism as a new transdisciplinary paradigm in literary and cultural studies. In a most general sense, ecocriticism represents a response of the humanities to the environmental crisis which modern civilization has brought about in its uncontrolled economic and technological expansionism. In addition to categories like class, race, gender, ethnicity, or sexuality, nature (together with related terms such as environment, place, earth, planet) has become a central category of cultural studies—albeit a strangely hybrid category located somewhere between world and text, realist concept and discursive construct.