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With its publication in 1980, Carolyn Merchant's The Death of Nature, which made central a devastating critique of Francis Bacon on environ- mental grounds, helped inaugurate the field of ecocriticism. Merchant was not, however, the first critic to consider early modern texts from an environmental perspective. In the early 1970s, in The Country and the City, Raymond Williams sought to understand what rural life in England was really like — once you sifted through an enormous amount of murky ide- ology. Even before Williams, in 1964, just two years after Rachel Carson published Silent Spring and arguably ignited the modern environmental movement in the process, Leo Marx made a reading of early modern pas- toral and Shakespeare's Tempest integral to his The Machine in the Garden.

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