A material ecocritical approach to the poetry of Dylan Thomas

Abstract

Material ecocriticism, representing a material turn in ecocritical studies, is faithfully committed to undermine the anthropocentric ideology of humans’ superiority over the natural environment and reconfigures human and nonhuman beings as materially entangled entities whose stories as well as physical bodies are interwoven together. What essentially emphasized by the material ecocritical theory is the indistinguishable relatedness and the coexistence of the physical universe and the textuality, the mattfer and the language, human and nature. Demolishing human’s exceptional status over nature and rejecting any kind of human guardianship of nature, material ecocriticism unshackles nature from human representations, definitions or meanings and attributes vitality and agency to natural elements that are capable of producing meaningful stories of their own. Accordingly, Dylan Thomas (1924-1953) reinforces man’s situatedness within the earth throughout his poetry, instead of constructing impermeable discrepancies between human and nature. Thomas develops material ecological understanding of the universe in which human and nonhuman entities are biologically connected to each other. Therefore, the aim of this study is to analyze Dylan Thomas’ poetry from the perspective of material ecocriticism to provide an insight to Thomas’ depiction of nature as a dynamic entity rather than as a passive object.