ABSTRACT
In reading Virginia Woolf’s The Waves and To the Lighthouse, one is easily caught up in awe regarding the ever changing seascape – its power, its beauty. Somehow it evokes both fascination and fear. This chapter addresses Woolf’s notion of waves as an eternal source of renewal. It explores the metaphor of renewal as part of three interconnecting facets, an environmental debate, an embodied set of practices and a discourse based on shifting Cornish identities. Surfing, waves and water pollution protest are all part of a wider interest in places of motion and change, as well as a changing political landscape that is increasingly accounting for, as well as linking, issues of Cornish identity with local concerns for the state of the environment. Youth culture and its association with seaside leisure pursuits is now, more than ever, recognised as part of an embodiment of extremes that is somehow less excessive in Cornwall’s schism of socio-cultural distinctions. That is, the embodiments that are part of ‘greening the extreme’ nevertheless carve a middle ground between the highbrow cultural traits of language or art and the historical working attributes associated with mining, fishing and farming.
