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 she learned she had rheumatoid arthritis when she was 19 and had been using a wheelchair for the last decade. She died of infections resulting from sores from prolonged sitting, he said.

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 also 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.