The Afterword addresses the historical dominance of white voices in British nature writing, and the marginality of race, class and gender politics in the genre. This tendency matches continuing inequalities in the social and ethnic composition of British environmentalist movements. Contemporary nature writing also reflects regional inequalities, with many of its leading figures clustering around East Anglia. Nonetheless, Elizabeth-Jane Burnett’s recent book The Grassling exemplifies British nature writing that stands out not only through the unconventional background of its author, but also through its experimental techniques. At the same time, platforms such as The Willowherb Review suggest that the genre and the critical culture around it are gradually changing to allow room for more diverse voices. However, nature writers of colour venturing into rural environments still find themselves contending with the stark racial divide between Britain’s cities and countryside. Similarly, a growing range of LGBTQ* nature writers are becoming increasingly visible in the genre and challenging heteronormative codings of the rural. In the aftermath of Brexit and a global pandemic, Britain’s nature writers confront a nation highly divided and isolated, and a literary heritage permeated by elitist elements which need to be reckoned with.

British nature writing is a conflict-ridden mode that speaks to contradictions in the modern condition, and a crisis-ridden mode that addresses the modern crises of the environment, of representation and of the alienated self. It returns repeatedly to problems of mimesis and the non-transparency of language, and to the slippages between ecological facts and the cultural imagination. ‘Nature writing’ is a problematic category, and classifications of earlier literature as such must be qualified, recognising the historical overlapping of environmental literature with natural history and other genres. Although British nature writing grew in dialogue with its American equivalent, it has always been less concerned than the latter with the wilderness, addressing more cultivated environments in which wildlife intermingles with human social and economic activity. The genre has long sought spiritual renewal and significance in wildlife and engaged in conservation movements, although its environmentalist ethics have not been consistent. British nature writing has also been deeply shaped by the pastoral and georgic traditions, causing it to waver between the foci of leisurely contemplation and laborious activity.

Chapter 4 examines contemporary nature writing, initially focusing on the ‘new nature writing’ of the past few decades. It argues that this writing, ostensibly an attempt to engage with the ‘post-natural’ conditions of the Anthropocene, is haunted by a feeling of inadequacy in relation to its predecessors and marked by the frustrations of ‘late style’. Indeed, many British writers of the period are best seen as ‘late Moderns’, expressing deep-seated anxieties about themselves, their writing, and their position in a rapidly diminishing natural world. This thesis is examined in relation to writers whose work simultaneously attempts to recall the wild and reflects on the impossibility of that exercise; other writers are then brought in to examine those contemporary post-industrial landscapes that might create the conditions of possibility for a ‘new wild’. The second half of the chapter pursues this line of argument, but in relation to another popular subgenre, animal writing, which is seen as containing regenerative potential but also as communicating unsettling insights into the always unstable relationship between animal others and human selves. The chapter then concludes with some reflections on a different kind of violence, the violence of the elements, which in today’s era of accelerated climate change is both significantly influenced by human beings and beyond the bounds of human control.

Chapter 1 reveals the complexity and self-consciousness of Romantic nature writing, bringing together authors who share an interest in nonhuman nature as a dynamic process. It also addresses the porousness of Romantic nature writing as a mode of engagement across different kinds of texts. A key claim is that, while Gilbert White’s localism and close field observations were influential on later nature writing, so was the strand of confessional autobiography pioneered by Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Romantic nature writing is often represented as a self-aggrandising masculine mode. But women writers such as Dorothy Wordsworth and Charlotte Smith were significant, particularly in their portrayals of nonhuman nature as entangled with everyday human life. The chapter also addresses labouring-class writers, bringing John Clare’s natural history prose into dialogue with the work of the artist Thomas Bewick and the novelist and poet James Hogg. All three resisted and lamented the forces of modernisation, but did so through developing innovative modes of representation. Even at its most backward-looking, Romantic nature writing engaged with the contradictions and conflicts of modernity. And, while influenced by natural theology, it also dared to speculate about deep time and the transience of human species.

Chapter 3 addresses the Modern period. As good a way as any of designating the period is via Eric Hobsbawm’s moniker the Short Twentieth Century (1914–91), which he sees as an age of extremes marked, especially in its first half, by a sequence of potentially world-ending catastrophes bookended by the two world wars. Much nature writing of the time evidences this apocalyptic trend, though it also takes heart in the regenerative properties of nature, which is viewed, via the lenses of such fast-developing disciplines as ecology and ethology, with an increasingly scientific eye. The first part of the chapter draws accordingly on writing which, informed by evolving ecological understandings, also debates the protectionist measures needed to combat species extinction in an ecologically threatened world. These ecological threats are then brought to bear on early- to mid-twentieth-century rural writing, which is often all too hastily viewed as reacting against the modern forces of industrialisation and urbanisation, but is better seen as belonging to a complex machinery of rural representation adapted to the cultural needs of post-war England as well as to the new technological demands of a rapidly modernising world.

Victorian nature writing vacillated between escapist pastoral idealism and hands-on georgic realism. Its narrators were at once labourers and idlers, scientists and aesthetes. The genre’s hybridity allowed it to mediate between mechanistic paradigms of nature and religious beliefs and experiences. Natural environments were constructed as realms of both Darwinian struggle and spiritual revelation. Imagining nature appreciation as a form of self-culture sometimes encouraged a nascent ecological and humanitarian sensibility. However, Victorian nature writing remained generally anthropocentric, centring the human mind. Yet, some authors, particularly later in the period, also framed wild environments and organisms as radically alien and unknowable. These different tendencies were often expressed through rhetoric of strangeness and estrangement, which dovetailed with ambivalences about identity, place and belonging. While authors classified objects, creatures and plants as alternately native or foreign, these categories frequently became blurred or uncertain. Authors also equivocated on where to locate ‘nature’, tracing it through rural, coastal and urban areas, in the great outdoors and human homes. Authors discussed include John Ruskin, Charles Kingsley, Philip Henry Gosse, Margaret Gatty, Hugh Miller, Eliza Brightwen, Richard Jefferies and W. H. Hudson.

Postcolonialism in the Age of Global Commodity Culture

The Trouble with Postcolonialism

Critiques of postcolonialism have intensified over the last decade, by no coincidence the decade that has also brought postcolonial studies to prominence as an institutionalized academic field. Postcolonial studies, though never fully accepted within the academy, has become distinctly fashionable; ‘postcolonial’ is a word on many people's lips, even if no one seems to know quite what it means. Like other commodified terms used largely for academic purposes, postcolonialism has taken full advantage of its own semantic vagueness. Like its sister term, postmodernism, it has yielded a cache of definitions, each of these recognized as provisional, as if in anticipation of the next to come. It would be simple, but also simplistic, to be cynical about this definition industry which, in an era of academic overproduction, has helped to keep people in careers; the fact remains that postcolonialism, for all its definitional—not to mention methodological—inconsistencies, has provided a catalyst for some of the most exciting intellectual work to be seen today. To ask ‘what is postcolonialism?’ appears, in any case, to be less productive than to ask some such other question as ‘what can postcolonialism do?’. Bart Moore-Gilbert, in his recent survey Postcolonial Theory(1997), puts the case for postcolonial criticism as ‘a more or less distinct set of reading practices ... preoccupied principally with analysis of cultural forms which mediate, challenge or reflect upon … relations of domination and subordination’ (12). These relations, continues Moore-Gilbert, ‘have their roots in the history of modern European colonialism and imperialism,’ but they also ‘continue to be apparent in the present era of neocolonialism’ (12). While this is as good a working definition as any, it still leaves room for doubt. For as Moore-Gilbert himself recognizes, it is far too broad and still too narrow: too broad in the obvious sense that too much time and space is covered, too narrow in that it excludes other, possibly related oppositional practices. The trouble with postcolonialism, when seen as a broad-based critical method, is that it risks being collapsed into a catch-all ‘metaphor for cultural embattlement’ (Suleri 1992b).

During the reign of Pandion of Atticus, war broke out with the Atticans’ longstanding adversaries, the Boeotians. Pandion eventually managed to secure a vital alliance with the Thracian King, Tereus, by offering his eldest daughter, Procne, in marriage. Lonely in Thrace, Procne pleaded with Tereus for her younger sister, Philomela, to come out and join her. Tereus agreed and went to fetch Philomela. He brought her back to Thrace, but not before he had forced his affections on her, raped her and, to prevent her from complaining, cut out her tongue. Philomela still found a way of making herself understood, however, by embroidering a tapestry which reconstructed the story of her rape. Realizing what had happened, Procne plotted her revenge, treating Tereus to a succulent meal – consisting of his own son. Bursting with rage (and indigestion?), Tereus went after the two sisters with an axe. Sympathizing with their plight, the gods saved Procne and Philomela by turning them into birds: Procne became a swallow, Philomela a nightingale. Tereus, for his sins, became a hoopoe.

The story of Philomela, or rather the story of Philomela's retold story, is one of the best-known of the Attic legends, a source of inspiration for many beleaguered poets who have used the legend to celebrate, or lament, their own insufficiently acknowledged ability. But more recently, the legend has taken on a different, allegorical significance; for in the work of several contemporary postcolonial writers, Philomela's story has become a paradigm for the re-enactment of colonial encounter, for the articulation of a violent history of dispossession and deprivation which circumstances dictate must be told in another way. By providing these writers with an alternative framework for the expression of an otherwise repressed, or censored, history, the Philomela legend allows them to confront and imaginatively transform the past. The conversion in the legend of silence into song also provides a motivation for postcolonial writers seeking to overcome the imaginative legacy of their colonial past. The affiliation between silence and music in several postcolonial texts can be seen in this context as providing alternative, non-verbal codes that subvert and/or replace those earlier, overdetermined narratives of colonial encounter in which the word is recognized to have played a crucial role in the production and maintenance of colonial hierarchies of power.