More than Backpacks and Swims: British Nature Writing and the Consolatory Role of Nature

Result code in IS VaVaI

<a href="https://www.isvavai.cz/riv?ss=detail&h=RIV%2F00216275%3A25210%2F25%3A39923447" target="_blank" >RIV/00216275:25210/25:39923447 - isvavai.cz</a>

Result on the web

<a href="https://brill.com/display/book/9789004744110/BP000015.xml?body=pdf-133841" target="_blank" >https://brill.com/display/book/9789004744110/BP000015.xml?body=pdf-133841</a>

DOI - Digital Object Identifier

<a href="http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/9789004744110_009" target="_blank" >10.1163/9789004744110_009</a>

Result language

angličtina

Original language name

More than Backpacks and Swims: British Nature Writing and the Consolatory Role of Nature

Original language description

The chapter focuses on the genre of nature writing and its response to the changing notion of the environment. The two chosen texts, Roger Deakin’s Waterlog (1999) and Hugh Thomson’s The Green Road into the Trees (2012), show multiple ways in which the environment plays a consolatory role, predominantly by allowing a more accurate and up-to-date identity definition. Rather than focusing on a subject-centred and uninvolved scientific depiction of the environment, these works show personal engagement and suggest possible strategies of reconnecting and enjoying the transcendental dimension of the interface between the human and the natural. In its initial part, the article argues that the contemporary approach to the environment must change to facilitate such a reconciliation, and new nature writing, as a genre devoted to the interface between the human and the natural, thus changes accordingly. Without shedding its Romantic heritage completely, the analyzed works deepen the genre’s insight into, for example, the political dimension of human relationship to the environment. Deakin and Thomson discuss the contrast between the ownership and stewardship of nature, the issue of conservation and its meaningfulness. In the section dealing with immersion and embeddedness, the analysis stresses the importance of experiential knowledge − the experience of physical immersion opens new cultural layers of the environment for both writers, activating their awareness of several collective and individual identities. The final part of the discussion highlights how the writers go beyond the purely conscious awareness of the self and explore the possibilities of transcendental reconnections. The chapter thus combines an analysis of the genre’s new scope with an application of critical insights to a classic text of new nature writing (Deakin) and a text that has not yet received substantial critical attention (Thomson).

Czech name

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Czech description

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Type

C - Chapter in a specialist book

CEP classification

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OECD FORD branch

60206 - Specific literatures

Project

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Continuities

I - Institucionalni podpora na dlouhodoby koncepcni rozvoj vyzkumne organizace

Publication year

2025

Confidentiality

S - Úplné a pravdivé údaje o projektu nepodléhají ochraně podle zvláštních právních předpisů

Book/collection name

Consolations of Nature

ISBN

978-90-04-74410-3

Number of pages of the result

16

Pages from-to

128-143

Number of pages of the book

231

Publisher name

Brill

Place of publication

Leiden

UT code for WoS chapter

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