ABSTRACT
One of the defining features of Robert Macfarlane's new formulations of nature writing approached here, and of nature writing as a genre, is the exploration of humans' relationship with the non-human environments they inhabit. This often takes place through the employment of hybrid or generically ambiguous literary forms that encompass both experiential and cultural accounts of place. Macfarlane's identification of a shift from wild states of land to wild states of mind suggests a tension between externalist and internalist approaches to engaging with wildness, nature, and place. Language and description are important to Macfarlane's engagements with nature, but it is perhaps narrative that is the single most significant feature there. Macfarlane's representation of place and nature deploys techniques of defamiliarization in relation to the quotidian and the everyday that can be traced back to Shklovsky's ostranenie.
