Land Lines: Modern British Nature Writing, 1789-2014

自然写作在英国可能和以往一样受欢迎，但它仍然被严重低估。它也经常被误解。误解的一个来源是，自然写作支持稳定秩序的神话——社会的、道德的、生态的——而另一个来源是，它表现出一种安慰性的美学，主要是为了让读者回归自然世界。这些观点忽视了自英国自然写作在18世纪后期作为现代形式出现以来一直嵌入其中的重大冲突。这些冲突中有许多是与现代性同时发生的。我们如何认识“自然”，是否真的有可能描述它？“自然”在多大程度上是我们个人和集体（国家）想象的投射？当它所剩无几的时候，我们还能感激多少呢？该项目是该领域四位顶尖学者合作的成果，将是对现代英国自然写作的第一次全面研究，从1789年吉尔伯特·怀特的开创性研究《塞尔伯恩的自然史》开始，到2014年海伦·麦克唐纳获奖的回忆录《H是鹰》结束。在这两者之间存在着一种类型的参差不齐的历史，它在三重危机的标志下出现：环境危机；代表性危机；以及现代性本身的危机。重点将放在非虚构的散文上，不是因为它是“最真实”的自然写作形式，而是因为它带来了该类型最基本的紧张关系之一：在与自然世界建立模仿关系的愿望与意识到这样做是不可能的之间，因为“自然”总是与我们想象的不同，即使我们自己也是其中的一部分。方法将从环境史和哲学以及文学批评中汲取，在环境人文学科的精神下共同努力，寻求展示基于文本和话语的文化、伦理和历史观点如何与更多经验形式的科学研究（例如与生态学相关的研究）一起工作，以增强对人类与自然世界不断变化的相互作用的理解。该项目将为英国自然写作的一些经典文本提供新鲜的阅读，根据当前对断裂主体性、后平衡生态学以及人类与其他动物之间错综复杂的关系的理解来解释这些文本，这些关系最近被一些批评理论家称为越来越“后人类”，甚至是绝对的“后自然”世界。这些理解被一些人视为所谓的“新自然写作”的基础，这种写作在过去大约三十年中出现在英国；但这种写作并不像它看起来那么“新”，该项目的任务之一将是确认当代辩论的历史基础。人们会说，只有从历史的角度看待自然写作，才能为它辩护，反对那种认为它实践了一种天真的现实主义的武断观点，或者草率地得出结论，认为它对自然世界采取了一种很大程度上虔诚的态度。相反，自然写作是一种高度自我反思的形式：很清楚自己的理解有限，很好地适应了自己语言的不足，并敏锐地意识到自己试图在自我、文本和世界之间实现三方和解的虚幻本质。自然写作是否有潜力改变它所描述的世界是没有意义的，但自然写作不是一种逃避现实的形式，这个项目——它将学术工作与各种公共参与活动结合起来，涉及所有背景和年龄的共同参与者——将展示它如何有效地参与一个现代世界，这个世界既存在可能无法补救的危机，也存在可能无法挽回的损失。

Nature writing in Britain is probably as popular as it has ever been, but it remains critically undervalued. It is also frequently misunderstood. One source of misunderstanding is the view that nature writing supports the myth of stable order --social, moral, ecological-- while another is that it performs a consolatory aesthetics designed primarily to restore its readers to the natural world. These views overlook the significant conflicts that have been embedded within British nature writing ever since it emerged as a modern form in the late eighteenth century. Many of these conflicts are coeval with modernity. How can we know 'nature', and is it really possible to describe it? To what extent is 'nature' a projection of our own individual and collective (national) imaginings? How much can we appreciate it when there is so little of it left? The product of a collaboration between four leading scholars in the field, this project will be the first full-length study of its kind of modern British nature writing, beginning in 1789 with Gilbert White's seminal study, The Natural History of Selborne, and ending in 2014 with Helen Macdonald's prize-winning memoir, H is for Hawk. Between the two lies the jagged history of a genre that emerges under the sign of a triple crisis: the crisis of the environment; the crisis of representation; and the crisis of modernity itself. Emphasis will be placed on non-fictional prose, not because it is the 'truest' form of nature writing, but because it brings out one of the genre's most fundamental tensions: between the desire to set up a mimetic relation to the natural world and the awareness of the impossibility of doing so, for 'nature' is always other to what we imagine it to be, even if we are a part of it ourselves. Methods will be drawn from environmental history and philosophy as well as literary criticism, working together in the spirit of the environmental humanities, which seek to show how text- and discourse-based perspectives on culture, ethics, and history can work together with more empirical forms of scientific research, e.g. those connected with ecology, to produce enhanced understandings of changing human interactions with the natural world. The project will offer fresh readings of some of the classic texts of British nature writing, interpreting these in the light of current understandings of fractured subjectivity, post-equilibrium ecology, and the tangled relationship between humans and other animals in what some recent critical theorists have taken to calling an increasingly 'post-human', even a definitively 'post-natural', world. These understandings are seen by some as underlying the so-called 'new nature writing' that has emerged in Britain over roughly the last three decades; but this writing is not as 'new' as it appears, and one of the tasks of the project will be to confirm the historical grounding of contemporary debates. Only by seeing nature writing historically, it will be argued, can it be defended against the peremptory view that it practises a naive realism, or the hasty conclusion that it adopts a largely devotional attitude to the natural world. On the contrary, nature writing is a highly self-reflexive form: well aware of its own limited understandings, finely attuned to the inadequacy of its own language, and keenly conscious of the illusory nature of its attempts to achieve a three-way reconciliation between self, text, and world. Whether nature writing has potential to transform the world it describes is moot, but nature writing is not an escapist form and the project -- which will combine academic work with a variety of public engagement activities involving co-participants of all backgrounds and ages -- will show how it engages productively with a modern world that is both inhabited by possibly irremediable crisis and haunted by possibly irretrievable loss.