Edgelands, virtual lands, and wastelands: 'new nature writing' and the Anthropocene wilds

本文将从“新性写作”这一体裁出发，探讨散文写作对人类世“荒野”意义的启示。新自然写作(Cowley，2008)，被定义为过去20年的自然、旅行和地点写作，可以说是对气候危机最强烈的文化回应。它反映了人们对自然界的兴趣与日俱增，需要以不同的方式思考它，因此是开始回答这个项目提出的问题的最佳地点。它将展示对荒野的不同理解和位置，反映人类世生活的现实，以及如何最好地驾驭它。新自然写作表现出对二元理解的转变，取而代之的是对非人类世界的跨学科、实验性的描述，“借鉴自传体和旅行叙事、艺术、文学和民俗”(Hunt，2012，71)。这些作家具有“创造性和自我反身性”(Smith，2018，5)，他们对气候灾难和人类日常共谋的压力做出了个人反应。新自然写作提供了一种任何人都可以在任何地方找到的狂野景象。这是一个民主和国际化的荒野，是市中心人行道裂缝和边缘地带的荒野，是心灵、身体和家庭的荒野，是人类历史和深刻时代的荒野，与高山、山谷和荒野的壮丽美学并驾齐驱。凯瑟琳·杰米在洗衣服和接孩子放学之间找到了荒野的时间(2005，39)，罗伯特·麦克法兰在《荒野之地》(2008)的开头直接走出了他的郊区前门。这些作家消除了界限，模糊了人和动物之间的界限，并与技术一起颂扬原始。风景不是原始的，而是重新想象的，抵制简单的定义，但在每一个变化的召回中都得到了赞誉。在概述了新野生动物的大致定义后，这个项目将探索新自然作家所在的四个关键地点。第一个将是“边缘地带”，这个术语指的是现代英国被忽视的边缘地带，在那里野生动物肆无忌惮地繁衍生息。利用罗布·考恩的《共同点》(2015)和朱利安·霍夫曼的《小心》(2012)，我将解开与荒野有关的共存、不可定义性和想象力的关键概念，以便将现代英国的边缘地带定位为荒野，并询问我们可以从这些网站上学到什么，关于我们对人类世自然类别的态度。第二部分将关注荒地的概念，使用蒂姆·迪的垃圾填埋场(2018)和杰米的发现中充满活力的人造和有机多样性。通过探索人类世生活中弥漫的物质纠葛以及它们所代表的时间特性，我将寻求将荒地定位为时空未知的前沿，从而也就是荒野。然后，重点将转移到“循环”或“重塑”景观的概念上，考虑到重新开垦和城市景观的“恢复”如何基于对人类的不同定义来创造环境。通过分析乔治·蒙比奥特的《野性》(2014)和詹姆斯·里班克斯的《牧羊人的生活》(2015)，我将考察我们努力创造/重建的环境类型，并质疑我们为谁做这些。最后，我将探索虚拟的野性唤醒，考虑到在人类和非人类机构的相互联系中，虚拟现实和人工智能等未来主义技术如何照亮我们与野生世界和更广泛的物质世界的关系。我还将调查新自然作家和他们在社交媒体上的粉丝的存在，以便将这些元文本生态环境定位为“共同点”(Cowen，2015)，并询问在这个日益数字化的世界中，野生动物的未来可能是什么。

This thesis will explore what prose writing from the genre of 'new nature writing' can tell us about the meanings of 'wildness' in the Anthropocene. New nature writing (Cowley, 2008), defined as nature, travel and place writing from the last twenty years, is arguably the strongest cultural response to the climate crisis. It reflects an increasing interest in the natural world and a need to think about it differently, and is therefore the best place to begin answering the questions this project poses. It will expose alternative understandings and locations of the wild that reflect the reality of life in the Anthropocene, and how best to navigate it. New nature writing exhibits a move away from binary understandings and is instead characterised by interdisciplinary, experimental accounts of the non-human world, 'drawing upon autobiographical and travel narratives, art, literature and folklore' (Hunt, 2012, 71). These writers are 'creative and self-reflexive' (Smith, 2018, 5), offering personal reactions to the climate catastrophe and the stresses of daily human complicity. New nature writing offers a vision of wildness that can be found anywhere, by anyone. It is a democratic and cosmopolitan wild; a wildness of inner-city pavement cracks and edgelands, of the mind, body and domestic, of human history and of deep time, which is celebrated alongside the aesthetic grandeur of mountain, valley and moor. Kathleen Jamie finds time for the wild 'between the laundry and the fetching kids from school' (2005, 39), and Robert Macfarlane begins The Wild Places (2008) by walking straight out of his suburban front door. These writers dissolve boundaries, blur lines between human and animal, and celebrate the primal alongside the technological. Landscapes are not pristine, but reimagined, resistant to easy definition yet celebrated in every changing evocation. Having outlined a rough definition of the new wild, this project will explore four key sites in which new nature writers locate it. The first will be 'edgelands', a term given to the neglected peripheral fringes of modern Britain, in which wildlife flourishes unchecked. Using Rob Cowen's Common Ground (2015), and Julian Hoffman's The Small Heart of Things (2012), I will unpack the key concepts of coexistence, indefinability, and imagination in relation to wildness, in order to locate the edgelands of modern Britain as wild, and ask what we can learn from such sites about our attitudes towards categories of nature in the Anthropocene. The second section will focus on the notion of wastelands, using the vibrant manmade and organic diversity located in Tim Dee's Landfill (2018) and Jamie's Findings. By exploring the material entanglements that pervade life in the Anthropocene and the temporal peculiarities they represent, I will seek to posit wastelands as frontiers of the spatiotemporal unknown, and therefore the wild.The focus will then move to the notion of 'recycled' or 'remodelled' landscapes, considering how the movements of rewilding and urban landscape 'rehabilitation' create environments based upon definitions of the wild that vary in their treatment of the human. By analysing George Monbiot's Feral (2014) and James Rebanks' The Shepherd's Life (2015), I will examine the types of environments that we strive to create/recreate, and question for whom we do this.Finally, I will explore virtual evocations of wildness, considering how, in their interlinking of human and non-human agencies, futuristic technologies such as virtual reality and artificial intelligence can illuminate our relations to the wild and the wider material world. I will also examine the presence of new nature writers and their fans on social media in order to locate these metatextual eco-environments as 'areas of common ground' (Cowen, 2015), and ask what the future of the wild might be in this increasingly digital world.