Edgelands, virtual lands, and wastelands: 'new nature writing' and the Anthropocene wilds

This thesis will explore what prose writing from the genre of 'new nature writing' can tell us about the meanings of 'wildness' in the Anthropocene. New nature writing (Cowley, 2008), defined as nature, travel and place writing from the last twenty years, is arguably the strongest cultural response to the climate crisis. It reflects an increasing interest in the natural world and a need to think about it differently, and is therefore the best place to begin answering the questions this project poses. It will expose alternative understandings and locations of the wild that reflect the reality of life in the Anthropocene, and how best to navigate it.
New nature writing exhibits a move away from binary understandings and is instead characterised by interdisciplinary, experimental accounts of the non-human world, 'drawing upon autobiographical and travel narratives, art, literature and folklore' (Hunt, 2012, 71). These writers are 'creative and self-reflexive' (Smith, 2018, 5), offering personal reactions to the climate catastrophe and the stresses of daily human complicity. New nature writing offers a vision of wildness that can be found anywhere, by anyone. It is a democratic and cosmopolitan wild; a wildness of inner-city pavement cracks and edgelands, of the mind, body and domestic, of human history and of deep time, which is celebrated alongside the aesthetic grandeur of mountain, valley and moor. Kathleen Jamie finds time for the wild 'between the laundry and the fetching kids from school' (2005, 39), and Robert Macfarlane begins The Wild Places (2008) by walking straight out of his suburban front door. These writers dissolve boundaries, blur lines between human and animal, and celebrate the primal alongside the technological. Landscapes are not pristine, but reimagined, resistant to easy definition yet celebrated in every changing evocation. Having outlined a rough definition of the new wild, this project will explore four key sites in which new nature writers locate it.

The first will be 'edgelands', a term given to the neglected peripheral fringes of modern Britain, in which wildlife flourishes unchecked. Using Rob Cowen's Common Ground (2015), and Julian Hoffman's The Small Heart of Things (2012), I will unpack the key concepts of coexistence, indefinability, and imagination in relation to wildness, in order to locate the edgelands of modern Britain as wild, and ask what we can learn from such sites about our attitudes towards categories of nature in the Anthropocene.

The second section will focus on the notion of wastelands, using the vibrant manmade and organic diversity located in Tim Dee's Landfill (2018) and Jamie's Findings. By exploring the material entanglements that pervade life in the Anthropocene and the temporal peculiarities they represent, I will seek to posit wastelands as frontiers of the spatiotemporal unknown, and therefore the wild.

The focus will then move to the notion of 'recycled' or 'remodelled' landscapes, considering how the movements of rewilding and urban landscape 'rehabilitation' create environments based upon definitions of the wild that vary in their treatment of the human. By analysing George Monbiot's Feral (2014) and James Rebanks' The Shepherd's Life (2015), I will examine the types of environments that we strive to create/recreate, and question for whom we do this.

Finally, I will explore virtual evocations of wildness, considering how, in their interlinking of human and non-human agencies, futuristic technologies such as virtual reality and artificial intelligence can illuminate our relations to the wild and the wider material world. I will also examine the presence of new nature writers and their fans on social media in order to locate these metatextual eco-environments as 'areas of common ground' (Cowen, 2015), and ask what the future of the wild might be in this increasingly digital world.