A series of articles that closely focused on the communicative/dialogical relationship between humans and Nature, and the agency of Nature. The issue examines old and new understandings of the agency of Nature/matter, and of what counts as speech. The issue also juxtaposes the premodern idea of a ‘language of nature’ as featured in aesthetics and literature in the 18th and 19th centuries with the new understandings of the concept in the context of ecocritical debates on nature’s agency.