Land Lines: Modern British Nature Writing, 1789-2014

Nature writing in Britain is probably as popular as it has ever been, but it remains critically undervalued. It is also frequently misunderstood. One source of misunderstanding is the view that nature writing supports the myth of stable order --social, moral, ecological-- while another is that it performs a consolatory aesthetics designed primarily to restore its readers to the natural world. These views overlook the significant conflicts that have been embedded within British nature writing ever since it emerged as a modern form in the late eighteenth century. Many of these conflicts are coeval with modernity. How can we know 'nature', and is it really possible to describe it? To what extent is 'nature' a projection of our own individual and collective (national) imaginings? How much can we appreciate it when there is so little of it left?

The product of a collaboration between four leading scholars in the field, this project will be the first full-length study of its kind of modern British nature writing, beginning in 1789 with Gilbert White's seminal study, The Natural History of Selborne, and ending in 2014 with Helen Macdonald's prize-winning memoir, H is for Hawk. Between the two lies the jagged history of a genre that emerges under the sign of a triple crisis: the crisis of the environment; the crisis of representation; and the crisis of modernity itself. Emphasis will be placed on non-fictional prose, not because it is the 'truest' form of nature writing, but because it brings out one of the genre's most fundamental tensions: between the desire to set up a mimetic relation to the natural world and the awareness of the impossibility of doing so, for 'nature' is always other to what we imagine it to be, even if we are a part of it ourselves. Methods will be drawn from environmental history and philosophy as well as literary criticism, working together in the spirit of the environmental humanities, which seek to show how text- and discourse-based perspectives on culture, ethics, and history can work together with more empirical forms of scientific research, e.g. those connected with ecology, to produce enhanced understandings of changing human interactions with the natural world.

The project will offer fresh readings of some of the classic texts of British nature writing, interpreting these in the light of current understandings of fractured subjectivity, post-equilibrium ecology, and the tangled relationship between humans and other animals in what some recent critical theorists have taken to calling an increasingly 'post-human', even a definitively 'post-natural', world. These understandings are seen by some as underlying the so-called 'new nature writing' that has emerged in Britain over roughly the last three decades; but this writing is not as 'new' as it appears, and one of the tasks of the project will be to confirm the historical grounding of contemporary debates. Only by seeing nature writing historically, it will be argued, can it be defended against the peremptory view that it practises a naive realism, or the hasty conclusion that it adopts a largely devotional attitude to the natural world. On the contrary, nature writing is a highly self-reflexive form: well aware of its own limited understandings, finely attuned to the inadequacy of its own language, and keenly conscious of the illusory nature of its attempts to achieve a three-way reconciliation between self, text, and world.

Whether nature writing has potential to transform the world it describes is moot, but nature writing is not an escapist form and the project -- which will combine academic work with a variety of public engagement activities involving co-participants of all backgrounds and ages -- will show how it engages productively with a modern world that is both inhabited by possibly irremediable crisis and haunted by possibly irretrievable loss.

This project looks to generate two kinds of impact, one more specific and the other more general. More specifically, it will provide new insights into the relationship between British nature, British nature writing, and British identity in the context of the social and economic conditions that produced, and have since sustained, what we might loosely call 'modernity'. More generally, it will increase contemporary public understandings of what it means to inhabit a technologically embellished but ecologically impoverished 'natural world'. The first kind of impact might easily be seen as being directed primarily towards an academic, the second more towards a non-academic, audience; however, it is important to recognise these two constituencies as being closely intertwined. Thus, a key concern of the project is to bring academic and non-academic participants together via a series of public engagement activities involving mutually transformative work with a variety of external partners, while a still broader aim is to produce creative forms of knowledge exchange that seek to educate, while also learning from the active imagination and physical energy of, the young. These activities, summarised below, have been arranged so as to (1) bring out the historical dimensions of the project, (2) involve participants of different ages and backgrounds, and (3) showcase the three different locations (Brighton/Sussex, St Andrews/Fife, Leeds/Yorkshire) at which the project's main researchers are based. An interactive website will allow for regular communication between project members and the public, and for updated findings to be posted and discussed.

*From May to July 2017, the project will collaborate with the Booth Museum of Natural History in Brighton to stage a family-oriented exhibition on the theme of Britishness and nature writing, taking inspiration from the museum founder Edward Thomas Booth's own pioneering work in documenting British birds. The English nature writer Helen Macdonald will be on hand to give a public lecture in connection with the exhibition.

*In July 2018, the project will join forces with local St Andrews secondary schools to put on a workshop which focuses on storytelling techniques in nature documentary film, which compares these to some of the techniques used in contemporary nature writing, and which asks what 'nature' signifies today for young people in Scotland. The Scottish nature writer Kathleen Jamie will give a talk in connection with the event.

*In September 2018, the project will work together with Yorkshire Wildlife Trust (YWT) and the University of Leeds-based Environmental Humanities ITN (European doctoral training programme) to host a marine-themed 'family day' at the Trust's Living Seas Centre in Flamborough. The day will include a family-oriented 'Living Seas Safari', a creative workshop aimed at primary-school children, and a short animated talk designed for a young audience by the popular English nature writer Philip Hoare.

*In December 2018, the project team will organise a 2-day, project-culminating international postgraduate/early-career-scholar conference on the history of modern British nature writing, which will be held at the University of Leeds in collaboration with the UK Association for the Study of Literature and Environment (ASLE). The conference will have a significant public-facing element. Speakers will include the writer Robert Macfarlane and the environmental campaigner George Monbiot.

In all four cases, activities will apply research findings taken from the project, aiming at the co-creation of knowledge --historical as well as contemporary-- that builds environmental consciousness in ecologically troubled times. Finally, it should be stressed that the project's main output, a co-authored book, will be the first of its kind and will thus generate significant academic impact, both within and beyond Britain, and both within and beyond its designated field.