T Gifford

Women in transit through literary liminal spaces

This edited book provides a unique opportunity for international scholars to contribute to the exploration of liminality in the field of Anglo-American literature written by or about women between the Victorian period and the Second World War

Biosemiology and Globalism in The Rapture by Liz Jensen

Liz Jensens novel The Rapture (2009) provides an opportunity to consider Wendy Wheelers version of biosemiotics in The Whole Creature (2006) and Ursula Heises advocacy of literary globalism in Sense of Place and Sense of Planet (2008). This essay examines both the kind of new insights they might provide to literary analysis and their respective places within the evolution of ecocriticism. Can such new theories help the reader decide whether this novel is just another apocalyptic thriller? Is The Rapture exploiting or explaining our environmental crisis?

Literature as cultural ecology

What does it mean to consider literature as cultural ecology? Robert Macfarlane has recently been encouraging us to return to Gregory Bateson’s notion of ‘ecology of mind’ to account for the curren...

Twentieth-century nature writing in Britain and Ireland

What exactly was new about the nature writing in Granta’s 2008 collection titled The New Nature Writing? One answer would be ‘not much’. Apart from Kathleen Jamie’s ‘Pathologies: A startling tour of our bodies’ much of the remaining writing followed a familiar pattern of the sensitive and informed individual’s encounter with nature. But this might be the response from a reader familiar with twentieth-century American nature writing. As several contributors to this issue discuss, in Britain and Ireland there has been a rather different tradition of nature writing – less spiritual and more concerned with natural history, perhaps less internally and more externally focused. Yet, recent British nature writers such as Robert Macfarlane are also clearly drawing upon the American tradition, as indicated in his interview in this issue. Another answer might be to remark upon the fact that Granta’s editor, Jason Cowley, found this writing to be new. British nature writing – archipelagic literature, biogeography, biopsychogeography and various newly named ‘subgenres’ – has been thriving in recent decades. It is true that writing about the British countryside and rural life dwindled in the midto-late twentieth century, perhaps due in part to critical association with sentimental escapism, or a lack of philosophical sophistication, while the international and urban travel narrative produced bumper crops. Raymond Williams’ The Country and the City (1973) gave permission for the blanket dismissal of pastoral writing which clouded the recognition of possible post-pastoral literature. And there are, indeed, problems intrinsic to the genre of nature writing. Edward Thomas, in his incarnation as a prose writer, described Beautiful Wales as ‘25,000 words of landscape, nearly all of it without humanity except what it may owe to a lanky shadow of myself’, ultimately finding poetry better suited to his personal encounters with non-human nature. Finding a structure for a series of narratives about the external environment is problematic. It runs the risk of sounding, to the sceptical British ear, inauthentic and stagy on the one hand, or indulgently personal and egocentric on the other. But besides the escapist and elitist tradition of British country literature critiqued by Williams, there has been a strand of writing about nature that has been radical, alternative and dissenting, as Kate Soper reminds us in her recent reconsideration of the Romantic tradition (2011). The strand of Romanticism which opposes positivism considers individual experience a vital component in any scientific account of external (or inner) nature. Hence that British scientifically informed nature writing with roots in a countryside writing tradition, that is shown to be flourishing in essays here by Alison Lacivita and Anna Stenning, or the environmentalist text, set out as a personal response to a crisis that is both personal and planetary, as Ben Smith indicates here. Jos Smith’s essay argues that there is no single history of a ‘nature writing’ genre. Smith indicates that Orage’s (1922) Readers and Writers: 1917–1921 has a chapter called ‘Nature writing in English literature’ and refers to Hudson and Jefferies as the finest Green Letters: Studies in Ecocriticism, 2013 Vol. 17, No. 1, 1–4, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14688417.2012.750839

Romantic naturalists, early environmentalists: an ecocritical study, 1789-1912, by Dewey W. Hall, Farnham, Ashgate, 2014, viii + 232 pp., £60.00 (hardback), ISBN 978-1-4097-2264-8

This book is an attempt to draw specific lines of influence from UK and US Romantic naturalists to transatlantically influenced early environmentalists. Because Dewey Hall wants to correct false li...

Five modes of ‘listening deeply’ to pastoral sounds

ABSTRACT In his Tales from Ovid Ted Hughes writes that in the Age of Gold people ‘listened deeply to the source’. This essay asks what this might mean, what modes of listening might achieve this and how we would recognise it. Beginning this discussion with a georgic folk song, which appears to be about harvest workers pastoralising their work, this essay opens up the first of five modes of listening by suggesting that there is a playful, harvest home, self-ironic listening mode at work here. Discussion moved from Andrew Marvel’s ‘The Garden’ to Bob Dylan’s song ‘Highlands’ to Keats’ ‘The Nightgale’. The final line of Coleridge’s poem ‘This Lime-Tree Bower my Prison’ is tested with reference to a passage from Cormac McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses. Recent research offers examples of listening from the Hawai’an people and from Blackfeet country in Montana.

International perspectives in feminist ecocriticism

the natural world and politics. George is very conscious of two of the major problems with rewilding: The first is an assumption that rewilding could mean we don’t have to fight to conserve wildlife populations and species anymore – a kind of biodiversity offsetting. And second, it could be used to justify scorched-earth policies on areas outside rewilding which become factory floor environments. This he feels should be addressed throughmore rewilding projects in farming rather than separating them out. But there’s another kind of elephant to consider. Although they find it hard to admit publically, many conservationists are well aware that traditional conservation has failed. This failure is the elephant in the room, an unavoidable yet barely communicable truth. George sees rewilding and the return of lost animals as the kind of vision people can rally around, as indeed some have for many years – it just hasn’t become a mainstream cultural project in Britain because it requires a radical change in land management and ownership.

Early Women Mountaineers Achieve Both Summits and Publication in Britain and America

’some [philosophers] argue that space is itself a feature of the external world, whereas others regard space as a concept whereby the mind imagines something that is, in fact, quite different from space’ (Callicott and Frodeman 2008: 273). The summit of a mountain is a very precise physical space. To have occupied a space one metre below the summit does not entitle a mountaineer to claim to have reached the summit of the mountain. In the case of some holy mountains where stepping onto the actual summit space would be regarded by local people as sacrilege, such as Kangchenjunga in 1955, this has been accepted by the mountaineering world as a first ascent (Isserman and Weaver 2008: 325). But this is an exception that proves a rule rigorously endorsed. Alone and in a whiteout in 2005 Alan Hinkes thought he had reached a space close enough to the summit of Kangchenjunga to claim that he had made an ascent, but the climbing community expressed some doubt about whether he had (Isherwood 2006: 308).

Ownership and access in the work of John Muir, John Buchan and Andrew Greig

John Muir left Scotland in 1849 for America and became famous for the concept formulated in his book Our National Parks (1901). Issues of access and ownership in the Highlands were the background to a novel by Andrew Greig published in 1996, The Return of John Macnab, which took its title from John Buchans novel of 1925, John Macnab. A comparison of the two novels reveals not only their historical differences and similarities in radicalism on these issues, but the problem of expressing a connected relationship with a national landscape (that Muir spent his lifetime seeking) when nature cannot be conceived except through the frames of politics and culture. Post-devolution, are these novels little more than historical curiosities today, given that Scotland now has national parks and the granting of a right to roam in 2003? Part of a historical momentum, these novels also explore key class tensions and landscape values for present readers.