ABSTRACT
This chapter examines how nature writing helped shape ideas of nature in the West, exploring the ecological perspectives that inform the so-called ‘new nature writing’ of Robert Macfarlane and others. Although Romanticism and scenic tourism sought to bring their subjects closer to nature at a time of urbanisation and materialism, they both ended up, through ‘aestheticisation and sentimentalisation’, distancing the natural environment from the site of human habitation and labour. The chapter welcomes ecocriticism’s scrutiny of our exploitation of the natural world in contrast to the celebratory tone of much traditional nature writing and sees in the new nature writing ‘a new poetics that […] aims to bridge the gap between human society and the biosphere that enfolds and supports it’.
