Brexitland's dark ecologies: new British landscape writing. Issue 5 (4th May 2022)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Luckhurst, Roger
• Is Part Of: Textual practice. Volume 36:Issue 5(2022)
• Page Start: 711
• Page End: 731
• Publication Date: 2022-05-04
• Subjects: Nature writing -- landscape -- Brexit -- climate crisis -- folk horror‌; Literature, Modern -- 20th century -- History and criticism -- Periodicals; Criticism -- Periodicals; Criticism, Textual -- Periodicals; Semiotics -- Periodicals; 801.95
• DOI: 10.1080/0950236X.2020.1841021
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 0950-236X

Abstract

ABSTRACT : This essay offers a taxonomy of the New British Landscape writing, first identified in 2008. It suggests five principal ways of organising this large and growing body of work: through the thematics of rewilding, trauma, folk horror, walking as counter-memory, and a fascination with provisional edgelands. The contextual framework suggests that landscape writing marks an attempt to bolster place against the abstraction of space in modernity, a tactic amplified by resurgence of nationalism since the financial crash of 2008. The distinct British version of this crisis has been marked by the sharply divisive Brexit vote, which inevitably cuts across many aspects of contemporary landscape writing.