Twentieth-century nature writing in Britain and Ireland

What exactly was new about the nature writing in Granta’s 2008 collection titled The New Nature Writing? One answer would be ‘not much’. Apart from Kathleen Jamie’s ‘Pathologies: A startling tour of our bodies’ much of the remaining writing followed a familiar pattern of the sensitive and informed individual’s encounter with nature. But this might be the response from a reader familiar with twentieth-century American nature writing. As several contributors to this issue discuss, in Britain and Ireland there has been a rather different tradition of nature writing – less spiritual and more concerned with natural history, perhaps less internally and more externally focused. Yet, recent British nature writers such as Robert Macfarlane are also clearly drawing upon the American tradition, as indicated in his interview in this issue. Another answer might be to remark upon the fact that Granta’s editor, Jason Cowley, found this writing to be new. British nature writing – archipelagic literature, biogeography, biopsychogeography and various newly named ‘subgenres’ – has been thriving in recent decades. It is true that writing about the British countryside and rural life dwindled in the midto-late twentieth century, perhaps due in part to critical association with sentimental escapism, or a lack of philosophical sophistication, while the international and urban travel narrative produced bumper crops. Raymond Williams’ The Country and the City (1973) gave permission for the blanket dismissal of pastoral writing which clouded the recognition of possible post-pastoral literature. And there are, indeed, problems intrinsic to the genre of nature writing. Edward Thomas, in his incarnation as a prose writer, described Beautiful Wales as ‘25,000 words of landscape, nearly all of it without humanity except what it may owe to a lanky shadow of myself’, ultimately finding poetry better suited to his personal encounters with non-human nature. Finding a structure for a series of narratives about the external environment is problematic. It runs the risk of sounding, to the sceptical British ear, inauthentic and stagy on the one hand, or indulgently personal and egocentric on the other. But besides the escapist and elitist tradition of British country literature critiqued by Williams, there has been a strand of writing about nature that has been radical, alternative and dissenting, as Kate Soper reminds us in her recent reconsideration of the Romantic tradition (2011). The strand of Romanticism which opposes positivism considers individual experience a vital component in any scientific account of external (or inner) nature. Hence that British scientifically informed nature writing with roots in a countryside writing tradition, that is shown to be flourishing in essays here by Alison Lacivita and Anna Stenning, or the environmentalist text, set out as a personal response to a crisis that is both personal and planetary, as Ben Smith indicates here. Jos Smith’s essay argues that there is no single history of a ‘nature writing’ genre. Smith indicates that Orage’s (1922) Readers and Writers: 1917–1921 has a chapter called ‘Nature writing in English literature’ and refers to Hudson and Jefferies as the finest Green Letters: Studies in Ecocriticism, 2013 Vol. 17, No. 1, 1–4, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14688417.2012.750839