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Modern British Nature Writing, 1789–2020

Modern British Nature Writing, 1789–2020

Modern British Nature Writing, 1789–2020

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Will Abberley, University of Sussex
Christina Alt, University of St Andrews, Scotland
David Higgins, University of Leeds
Graham Huggan, University of Leeds
Pippa Marland, University of Bristol
March 2022
This ISBN is for an eBook version which is distributed on our behalf by a third party.
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9781108129091

    Why do we speak so much of nature today when there is so little of it left? Prompted by this question, this study offers the first full-length exploration of modern British nature writing, from the late eighteenth century to the present. Focusing on non-fictional prose writing, the book supplies new readings of classic texts by Romantic, Victorian and Contemporary authors, situating these within the context of an enduringly popular genre. Nature writing is still widely considered fundamentally celebratory or escapist, yet it is also very much in tune with the conflicts of a natural world under threat. The book's five authors connect these conflicts to the triple historical crisis of the environment; of representation; and of modern dissociated sensibility. This book offers an informed critical approach to modern British nature writing for specialist readers, as well as a valuable guide for general readers concerned by an increasingly diminished natural world.

    • Provides a critical overview of British nature writing from the Romantic period onwards that will benefit specialist and general readers alike.
    • Convincingly proposes a new understanding of British nature writing as conflict-driven, challenging the prevailing view of the genre as celebratory or compensatory.
    • Offers fresh readings of classic texts by Romantic, Victorian and Modern/ Contemporary authors, applying state-of-the-art critical and theoretical perspectives.

    Reviews & endorsements

    '… this book brilliantly and provocatively makes the case for nature writing and its discussion as exploring both what 'environment' is and the nature of human 'impact' and interaction.' Terry Gifford, Agricultural History Review

    See more reviews

    Product details

    March 2022
    Hardback
    9781107191327
    300 pages
    235 × 158 × 21 mm
    0.54kg
    Available

    Table of Contents

    • Introduction
    • 1. Chapter One
    • 2. Chapter Two
    • 3. Chapter Three
    • 4. Chapter Four
    • Afterword: Shades of White.
      Authors
    • Will Abberley , University of Sussex

      Will Abberley is Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Sussex. His previous monographs are English Fiction and the Evolution of Language, 1850–1914 (2015) and Mimicry and Display in Victorian Culture (2020). He is currently writing a book on emotions and authority in Victorian natural history literature.

    • Christina Alt , University of St Andrews, Scotland

      Christina Alt is a Lecturer in Twentieth-Century Literature at the University of St Andrews. Her research focuses on early twentieth-century exchanges between literature and science, with particular emphases on ecology, ethology, and climatology. Her current research examines literary engagements with the newly formalised discipline of ecology in the modernist period.

    • David Higgins , University of Leeds

      David Higgins is Professor of Environmental Humanities at the University of Leeds. He has published widely on Romantic-period literature and, more recently, the cultural history of environmental catastrophe. His current research investigates the philosophical genealogy of contemporary climate change discourse.

    • Graham Huggan , University of Leeds

      Graham Huggan is Professor of English at the University of Leeds. His research straddles three fields: postcolonial studies, tourism studies, and environmental humanities, all of which are brought together in his most recent book, Colonialism, Culture, Whales: The Cetacean Quartet (2018).

    • Pippa Marland , University of Bristol

      Pippa Marland is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the University of Bristol. Her project 'The Pen and the Plough' explores the representation of farming in British nature writing. She has published widely on eco-poetry and creative non-fiction and is the author of Ecocriticism and the Island (forthcoming).