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，但它的价值仍然被严重低估。它也经常被误解。误解的一个来源是认为自然写作支持稳定秩序的神话-社会，道德，生态-而另一个是它表现出一种安慰美学，主要是为了让读者恢复自然世界。这些观点忽视了自18世纪晚期英国自然写作作为一种现代形式出现以来就一直存在的重大冲突。这些冲突中有许多与现代性是同时代的。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）幸福的投射？当它所剩无几时，我们能欣赏它多少呢？该项目是该领域四位主要学者合作的产物，将是第一个对现代英国自然写作进行全面研究的项目，始于1789年，由吉尔伯特白色的开创性研究《塞尔伯恩的自然史》，并于2014年以海伦·麦克唐纳获奖的回忆录《H是鹰》结束。在这两者之间，是一个在三重危机的标志下出现的流派的参差不齐的历史：环境的危机;再现的危机;现代性本身的危机。重点将放在非虚构的散文上，不是因为它是自然写作的“最真实”形式，而是因为它带来了这一体裁最基本的张力之一：在建立与自然世界的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，即使我们自己是它的一部分。方法将从环境历史和哲学以及文学批评，在环境人文精神，这试图显示如何文本和话语为基础的文化，伦理和历史的观点可以与科学研究的更多经验形式，如与生态学，产生变化的人类与自然世界的相互作用的增强理解。该项目将提供英国自然写作的一些经典文本的新的阅读，解释这些断裂的主观性，后平衡生态学，以及人类和其他动物之间的纠结关系，在最近的一些批判理论家已经采取了所谓的越来越“后人类”，甚至是一个明确的“后自然”，世界的当前理解。这些理解被一些人视为过去三十年来在英国出现的所谓“新自然写作”的基础;但这种写作并不像它看起来那样“新”，该项目的任务之一将是确认当代辩论的历史基础。只有通过历史地观察自然书写，我们才能反驳认为自然是天真的现实主义的武断观点，或者认为自然对自然世界采取了一种主要的虔诚态度的草率结论。相反，自然写作是一种高度自我反思的形式：它清楚地意识到自己有限的理解，敏锐地意识到自己语言的不足，并敏锐地意识到它试图在自我、文本和世界之间实现三方和解的虚幻性。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，该项目将联合收割机学术工作与各种公众参与活动相结合，涉及所有背景和年龄的共同参与者，将展示它如何与现代世界进行富有成效的接触，这个世界既充满了可能无法补救的危机，又受到可能无法挽回的损失的困扰。

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.