NEW YORK — Annette Kolodny, a literary and cultural critic who was a pioneer in the field of ecofeminism, drawing parallels between the subjugation of the environment and the subjugation of women, died on Sept. 11 at her home in Tucson. She was 78.
Her husband, Daniel Peters, said that she was diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis when she was 19 and had been using a wheelchair for the past decade and that she died of infections resulting from sores from prolonged sitting.
Dr. Kolodny was a prodigious author and scholar with many areas of interest, among them early American literature, Native American culture, women’s studies, and feminist literary criticism. Although she wrote books, she specialized in essays, and much of her most influential work — including perhaps her most famous piece, “Dancing Through the Minefield: Some Observations on the Theory, Practice, and Politics of a Feminist Literary Criticism” (1980) — was published in academic and literary journals.
She was one of the first Americans to delve into ecofeminism, a subgenre of feminist literary criticism that grew out of the environmental movement of the 1960s.
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Through this lens, she connected the ravaging of the land, particularly in the opening of the American West, and the ravaging of women. She explored that concept in a book “The Lay of the Land: Metaphor as Experience and History in American Life and Letters” (1975).
She was teaching at the University of New Hampshire when she wrote that book, and while it broke new ground and received positive reviews, she was denied tenure, even as men with similar credentials were promoted. That led her to sue the university for discrimination; the university settled with her out of court in 1980, but the experience was traumatic.
“We lost almost all of the friends we thought we made,” her husband, who is a novelist, said. “At a certain point, a number of the women suddenly started getting tenure, and they drummed her out of their group. She felt they had abandoned her.”
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Still, she continued her scholarly and critical work. In 1984, she published another important book on ecofeminism, “The Land Before Her: Fantasy and Experience of the American Frontiers, 1630—1860.”
In 2012, she completed one of her most monumental and well-regarded books, “In Search of First Contact: The Vikings of Vinland, the Peoples of the Dawnland, and the Anglo-American Anxiety of Discovery.” In it, she reexamined two medieval Icelandic tales, known as the Vinland sagas, and argued that they were the first known European narratives about contact with Native Americans.
“Her interest in Native Americans arose with her interest in ecofeminism, because they both dealt with issues of cultural and economic appropriation,” Adele Barker, a friend and former professor who worked with Ms. Kolodny at the University of Arizona, said in an interview.
Annette Kolodny was born on on Governors Island in New York Harbor, where her father, David Kolodny, a dentist, was stationed while in the Army. Her mother, Esther (Rifkin), was a public school teacher.
She attended Brooklyn College, graduating in 1962. She went to work as a low-level employee for Newsweek magazine’s international editions, but, like many women there, she was frustrated.
“Women were not being promoted,” Peters said.
She left after a year and studied English and American literature at the University of California Berkeley. She received her doctorate in 1969.
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Her first job after that was teaching at Yale, where she met Peters, a senior in her class on the contemporary American novel; they were married in 1970. In addition to him, she leaves her sisters, Nancy Weiner and Edie Kolodny-Nagy.
With the Vietnam War raging, Peters was worried about being drafted. The couple left Yale for Canada, where Ms. Kolodny taught literature at the University of British Columbia.
They returned to the United States in 1974, and she landed a teaching job at the University of New Hampshire in Durham.