As Cheryll Glotfelty notes in her introduction to The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology (1996), while many scholars had previously recognized the value of “the interconnections between nature and culture” they nevertheless remained rather isolated within their disciplines. Glotfelty points to the establishment of the ASLE (Association for the Study of Literature and Environment) in 1992 as a landmark recognition of this “emerging” field of study. Although “the influence of place on the imagination” has always formed an important aspect of literary and cultural studies, an ecocritical approach contributes by bringing to the discussion the “ethical and aesthetic dilemmas posed by the environmental crisis” and, with that, an expansion of the “notion of the world to include the entire ecosphere.”