In this collection, 21 noted ecocritics present a variety of material approaches to the environmental humanities. Editors Iovino and Oppermann helped inaugurate “material ecocriticism” in their 2012 article in Ecozon@ 3.1, the same year ISLE published a material ecocriticism special cluster (in issue 19.3, coedited by Dana Phillips and Heather I. Sullivan). In the introduction to Material Ecocriticism, Iovino and Oppermann outline the field's developments and primary influences, affirming that organic and nonorganic processes are also narrative performances, that matter tells stories and that literary critics can study such “narrative agency.” This founding recognition of matter's enmeshment with the cultural leaves plenty of room for diverse, sometimes divergent work, such that the resulting collection is a “polyphonic chorus, which addresses the issues at stake from various but complementary angles” (12).

While “material ecocriticism” might sound redundant, the term helps indicate the particular theoretical influences shaping this scholarship, which employs contemporary developments in physics, evolutionary biology, and other scientific fields. These theoretical influences are widely inclusive, “ranging from biosemiotics to ecology of mind, from ecological postmodernism to posthumanism, from ‘thing theory’ to object-oriented ontology” (10). Iovino and Oppermann acknowledge the particular affinity between material ecocriticism and material feminisms; both fields stress embodiment and relationality, and many of material ecocriticism's founding concepts (e.g., Karen Barad's “intra-action,” Stacy Alaimo's “trans-corporeality”) were developed by material feminists.