Outdoor Fiction

This is a less academic/ nature-y/ literature-y post and more one that addresses the research process.  I thought I would write a brief check-in and give a bit of insight into what I've been doing lately.  Namely, some less-romantic-than-anticipated and stressful things. These things primarily include; dense critical reading, dense critical reading and a bit more dense critical reading.  I've spent the last week grappling with a number of foundational texts in ecocriticism, the literary theory which explores (as Greg Garrard puts it), the "relationship between literature and the physical world." Whilst it has been very interesting and I would like to think that I am perhaps a bit cleverer now, it's also been quite daunting and complex. Of course, the impression that developing research is a breeze and that arguments just come strutting along into our heads fully formed is a total myth - and so I thought I would just spend a bit of time making this mythic status mo...

I stumbled across perhaps my favourite argument that I have read in research so far earlier this week. In Terry Gifford's "Pastoral", Gifford introduces the question as to whether pastoralism in literature constitutes a gloss for social and political inequality. This post isn't going to be overly formal but I found this idea so interesting to think about that I thought I'd try and explore it a bit more.  Firstly, what is the pastoral?  Well, it's not very clear cut. Or at least, not anymore. Gifford talks about this a lot in the first chapter and identifies three key ways we might approach the term;  - The earliest definition of "pastoral" is the literary tradition largely intended for urban audiences which would regale cool stories of shepherds chilling on the hillsides and living in harmony with nature. This developed into a broader tradition whereby characters would "retreat" into nature and bring back some insights and knowledge for the...

The relationship between literature and the outdoors is one that is both integral and often taken for granted. Setting is a given in 99% of texts yet, whilst forming the concrete foundations of the worlds that our favourite and most hated characters move within, the specific role and influence of a text's landscape is rarely unpacked. Rarer still is the thought given to the more "mundane" and everyday landscapes our natural world provides rather than those of science fiction, or history. Although some texts identifiably set out with the intention to revere and praise the natural world, we think less about those in which nature takes on a less central role and is simply "there". However, nature nonetheless shapes and informs any text that it is a feature of.  I will be conducting research this summer, funded by the Laidlaw Foundation, which will seek to explore some of this. This blog will be dedicated to my research, which examines concurrent themes of nature an...