Outdoor Fiction

This is a big question, and one that is at the heart of my summer research! Ecocriticism, the literary movement that seeks to explore the roles of nature in a text, has a lot to say about this. There aren't any definitive answers, but I thought it might be interesting to start unpacking this question and offer an opinion.  What does the theory say?  As mentioned, one of the key debates covered by ecocriticism is how far artistic and cultural discourse can actually prove valuable to solving the climate crisis. Greg Garrard discusses and summarizes some of this this in his book Ecocriticism to suggest that, by ecocriticism's currently dominating ideas, ecocritical theory, environmental writing, and art cannot - and should not -  develop new scientific ecological understanding. The reasons for this are multiple. Most notably, literary studies cannot offer new quantitative research to the ecological sciences. Equally, critics such as Timothy Morton suggest that viewing nature...

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...