| Summary: | "This book seeks to explain the popularity and appeal of contemporary writing about nature. The argument is that nature writing, in its various formats, contains formal effects of a complexity that is not sufficiently recognized, and that these paradoxical or antithetical effects encapsulate our current ecological dilemma, and offer a fresh resource for critical thinking. Such literary effects become more easily discernible when the distinctions between fictional and nonfictional writing are (partly) set aside, so that 'nature writing' is set within the broader conception of 'nature prose'. The book's range is international, with particular emphasis on writers from Britain and the US. The treatment and construction of 'nature' in contemporary imaginative prose reveals some significant paradoxes beneath its dominant moods-moods which are usually earnest, sometimes celebratory, sometimes prophetic or cautionary. It is in these paradoxical or antithetical moments that the contemporary ecological predicament is formally encoded, in a progressive development of ecological consciousness from the late 1950s (or even earlier), but which is primarily illustrated in this work from texts published from the 1990s onwards. The ambiguity in the subtitle of this book-'Writing in Ecological Crisis'-is intended to capture a mode of writing that is both contemporaneous with a defining time of crisis for humanity and formally fashioned by that context: this is writing that emerges in a time of crisis but which is also, in some ways, in crisis itself"--Publisher's description.
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