ABSTRACT
In their editorial to a recent special issue of Cultural Geographies considering narration, landscape and environment, Stephen Daniels and Hayden Lorimer have offered a synopsis of landscape as ‘a narrative medium’, and drawn attention to the way spatial narratives have increasingly been ‘focused within human individuals’ in recent years (Daniels and Lorimer, 2012, p. 4). This has often constituted ‘a new, consciously creative conjunction of personal biography and natural history, often conducted as a place based form of writing, in fact a renewed relationship that demands some critical reflection on its own history as a literary genre’ (p. 4). Within this broad trend, Daniels and Lorimer identify the sub-genre that has come to be known as ‘the new nature writing’ as a leading paradigm: ‘with both a popular readership and gathering academic attention, “new nature writing” reworks a centuries-old literary tradition of natural description and natural history publishing’ (p. 4). Here, I aim to survey a number of texts that might be said to inhabit this loose grouping – the ‘new nature writing’ – and focus on three examples that incorporate a self-reflexive aspect, demonstrating an awareness of their own narrative procedures and assumptions. That is, I aim to demonstrate that creative writers are themselves navigating this set of issues. Indeed, the texts selected for extended treatment are chosen not necessarily as the best recent examples of writing in this genre (there are certainly more nuanced offerings available), but because they wear their reflexivity very visibly. Increasingly, newly published place writing is written in dialogue with the academic ideas that would usually provide interpretative purchase on it. As a result, I want to acknowledge that these texts might themselves be providing leads for new directions in academia. Along with this methodological awareness, I will argue that these apparently non-fictional texts – or at least, texts that approach non-fictional subject matter – appropriate and redeploy the techniques of fictional and creative genres. That is, they already go some way towards performing the reflection on their relationship to and inheritance from established literary genres that Daniels and Lorimer call for. Indeed, this characteristic is informed by the fact that a good proportion of recent nature writing has been undertaken by writers already established and publishing work in other creative genres, and often also by writers in touch with academia in various ways.
