Doreen Massey, writing in her visionary book For Space, sets out a rallying cry for the building of interrelationships in the spaces of the contemporary world: ‘In this other spatiality, different temporalities and different voices must work out means of accommodation. The chance of space must be responded to’. In…
View More Responding to the Chance of Space in Marshland
Susan Sontag, in her 1969 work Styles of Radical Will, claimed that ‘there is no such thing as empty space. As long as a human eye is looking there is always something to see’ (10) – foreseeing with the simplicity of her statement a watershed moment in literary and cultural criticism, the spatial turn, the effects of which are still being comprehended and incorporated into the …
View More Towards a Taxonomy of Edgelands Literature
‘What exactly was new about the new nature writing in Granta’s 2008 collection titled The New Nature Writing? One answer would be “not much”’ (Stenning and Gifford, 1)…
View More Re-Approaching Urban Nature
In Edgelands (2011), Paul Farley and Michael Symmons Roberts explain their intention to ‘put aside our nostalgia for places we’ve never really known’ and instead seek…
View More Recovering Nostalgia in Nature Writing
With the proposition that we are now living in the Anthropocene – the geological epoch defined by human activities and their effects – the conditions of the pastoral are placed under unprecedented threat, and at the same time, they can be seen to be given new significance.
View More Human Nature: Pastoral in the Anthropocene