Table Of ContentAnneke Lubkowitz
Haunted Spaces in Twenty-First Century British Nature Writing
Buchreihe der Anglia/
ANGLIA Book Series
Edited by
Lucia Kornexl, Ursula Lenker, Martin Middeke,
Gabriele Rippl, Daniel Stein
Advisory Board
Laurel Brinton, Philip Durkin, Olga Fischer, Susan Irvine,
Andrew James Johnston, Christopher A. Jones, Terttu Nevalainen,
Derek Attridge, Elisabeth Bronfen, Ursula K. Heise, Verena Lobsien,
Laura Marcus, J. Hillis Miller, Martin Puchner
Volume 69
Anneke Lubkowitz
Haunted Spaces in
Twenty-First Century
British Nature Writing
ISBN 978-3-11-067859-8
e-ISBN (PDF) 978-3-11-067861-1
e-ISBN (EPUB) 978-3-11-067864-2
ISSN 0340-5435
Library of Congress Control Number: 2020931594
Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek
The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie;
detailed bibliographic data are available on the Internet at http://dnb.dnb.de.
© 2020 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston
Printing and binding: CPI books GmbH, Leck
www.degruyter.com
Acknowledgements
It is a truth universally acknowledged that it takes a village to write a book. I
began working on this monograph in 2015 and in 2018 it was accepted as a
PhD dissertation at Humboldt University Berlin. Mentioning all the people to
whomI am indebted for helpful suggestions,detailed feedback and moral sup-
portintheyearsbetweenandupuntilnowwouldrequireasecondpublication.
Tocutalongstoryshort,HauntedSpaceswouldneverhavebeenwrittenwithout
the support of Helga Schwalm who introduced me to the ‘New Nature Writing’
and became my supervisor in the earliest stages of my PhD. It was her encour-
agement and her brilliantly precise feedback which helped me stay on target
overtheyears.IalsowishtothankCordulaLemkeandEvelineKilianforhelpful
suggestionsandreadingrecommendationsinvariousstagesofthebook’sgene-
sis. I am much obliged to Jos Smith forgenerously sharinghis expertise on the
‘NewNatureWriting’withmeduringmyresearchvisittoNorwich,totheRoger
DeakinArchiveattheUniversityofEastAngliaforinsightsonthebeginningsof
the‘NewNatureWriting’andtoRobertMacfarlaneforthekindnessandpatience
in answering my probingquestions.
I am particularly grateful to my friend Sandra Dinter for her ingenious
thoughts and helpful advice and – no less important – her cheerful company
during long hours at the library. I enjoyed inspiring discussions with Stefanie
John, Simone Schröder, Rebeca Araya, Maria Alexopoulos, Eva Jenke, Nathalia
Saliba,KatharinaDeckerandRomanBartonwhoseinformedanddetailedfeed-
backonthechapterstheyreadwereagreathelp.IamindebtedtoAnnieRuth-
erford’s and Friederike Sachs’s wonderous improvements on the text. My work
alsogreatlybenefittedfromtherewardingexperienceofteachingBritishnature
writingatHumboldtUniversityandtheinquisitiveandwittyresponsesofmystu-
dents.IdonotknowhowIwouldhavemanagedwithoutthepassionatediscus-
sionsonliterature,placeandenvironmentwithFrankSievers,MikaelVogeland
Paul Scraton, like-minded spirits in their artistic work.
The completion of this book was enabled by the fincancial support of the
Elsa Neumann scholarship and I am particularly grateful to Dorothea Haselow
for tirelessly helping me with applications, accounts and research reports. I
moreover wish to thank the editors of the Anglia Book series and Ulrike Krauß
for the opportunity of publishing the book at De Gruyter, special thanks to
Marco Acquafredda for his initiative and to Katja Lehming for her kind support
in the publication process.
https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110678611-001
VI Acknowledgements
Therearesimplynowordstoexpressmygratitudetomypartner,myparents
andmyfriendswhonever,onthislongandwindingroad,stoppedbelievingin
me.
Contents
Introduction: Nature Writing noir 1
Writing Nature: A Historical Survey 20
. Idealization: Antiquity and Pastoral Poetry 21
. Sacralization and Secularization: Natural Theology and Natural
History 24
. Picturing Nature: Landscape Aesthetics 28
. Re-Enchantment: Romanticism 31
. Wilderness: A Brief Excursion to American Literature 38
. Faking Nature: Victorian Natural History and the Emergence of
Nature Writing 40
. Back to the Land: Nature, Placeand Nation 43
. Saving Nature: Environmental Writing 48
. After Nature: Twenty-First-Century Literatureand the
Anthropocene 53
Haunting Nature: Place, Space and Text 59
The Spectropoetics of Walking: Iain Sinclair and Robert
Macfarlane 77
. A Psychogeographical Outing: Haunting the Countryside with Iain
Sinclair 78
. On and off the Beaten Track: Tracing “Landscape [G]hosts” with
Robert Macfarlane 106
De-Crypting the Gendered Outdoors with Kathleen Jamie 134
Unweaving Fictions of the Far North with John Burnside 183
Many Voices? Broadening the Vision 227
Works Cited 251
Index 286
Introduction: Nature Writing noir
HalfwayintoBetweentheActs,VirginiaWoolf’smockinghomagetotheEnglish
countryside,theelderlyandslightlywhimsicalLucySwithinremarks,musingon
the rural scene before her eyes: “‘That’s what makes aview so sad […]. And so
beautiful. It’ll be there’, she nodded at the strip of gauze laid upon the distant
fields, ‘when we’re not.’” (Woolf Between: 66).This quote – chosen somewhat
randomlyandyetrepresentativeofalongliterarytradition–pinpointsapersis-
tentstructureinWesternthoughtwhichlinksnature,evokedhereasruralland-
scape,withstability,indestructibilityandpermanence,asopposedtowhatisim-
agined as its counterpart, human culture, society and politics. The deictic
“there”andthegestureofnoddingspatiallyreenactthisopposition,clearlysep-
aratingviewerfromview.However,hergesturegivesheraway;Lucy’snoddingis
directed at a“strip of gauze”, a thing characteristically unsubstantial and elu-
sive,whichcontradicts thesenseofpersistenceoriginallyevokedandironically
presents her view of nature as a dream-like fantasy. Moreover, her approach is
explicitly attacked by another character, the middle-aged Giles Oliver, in
whomtheruralidyllraisesanentirelydifferentimage:a“visionofEurope,bris-
tlingwithguns,poised with planes. At any moment guns would rake that land
into furrows; planes splinter Bolney Minster intosmithereens” (Woolf Between:
66–67). In pronounced contrast to that of Lucy,Giles’s imagination transforms
the human–nature dualism into an image of brutal intervention and change,
canceling nature’s invulnerability. As Giles scorns the escapism of “old fogies,
looking at views” (Woolf Between: 67), his visions of war present the rural
idyll as threatened,or, haunted by human conflict.
Today,thechargeofescapismissimilarlycloseathandwhenliteratureturns
towards nature, as it has so prevalently done in the United Kingdom over the
past two decades.This emerging literary trend has come to be associated with
the term‘New Nature Writing’, as suggested by the title of a 2008 issue of the
literarymagazineGranta,featuringsuchfigureheadsasRogerDeakin,Kathleen
JamieandRobertMacfarlane.Thequestion“IsOurLoveofNatureWritingBour-
geoisEscapism?”loomedunsettlinglylargeinthetitleofa2013articlebySteven
PooleinTheGuardian,andisonewhichmanyifnotalloftherepresentativesof
thisgroup of writers are likely to have askedthemselves at some point. Among
thetextspublishedinthepasttenyears,atleast,thoseaccountsofnaturewhich
resembleGiles’sdarkvisionofatroubledlandscapeoutnumbertheonesreach-
ingtowardsLucy’sidyll.AsTimDeenotesinhisintroductiontoananthologyof
twenty-first century writing of place: “Things fall apart and many of us like it
that way […]. Ghost walks, haunting, landfill, the draw-down of silting tides –
https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110678611-002
2 Introduction:NatureWritingnoir
allhavemadeforcopiousplace-basedliterarydeposits”(Dee2018b:9).Whereas
Dee’santhologyfocusesonplaceinmoregeneraltermsratherthanspecifically
onnaturewriting,hisobservationcertainlyholdstrueforthetextsdiscussedin
this study.
TheGrantaissueonthe‘NewNatureWriting’isexemplaryhere,asitoffers
an overwhelming number of contributions concerned with destruction, death
andghostlyafterlives;RobertMacfarlane’sessayisentitled“GhostSpecies”,re-
ferring to “a species that has been out-evolved by its environment, such that,
whileitcontinuestoexist,ithaslittleprospectofavoidingextinction”(Macfar-
lane “Ghost Species”:123). In Lydia Peelle’sshortstory“Phantom Pain”,whose
protagonist is, tellingly, a taxidermist, a ghostly panther haunts an American
town. “Pathologies” by Kathleen Jamie describes a visit to a pathology lab,
whereshelooksatthesickhumanbodyfrom‘within’.Yewtrees,typicalchurch-
yardtreessymbolizingeternallifeyetactually“showingreassuringsignsofmor-
tality” (Mabey “Tree”: 95) are the subject of Richard Mabey’s essay. Diverse as
their topics are, these contributions share a fascination with the dark and the
morbidfamiliarfromGothicfiction.Intheirunconventionalapproachtonature,
they resemble Giles’s replacement of the idyllic view with images of death and
destruction. If escapism is tied to the idealization of nature, as the passage
from Between the Acts illustrates, the Gothic elements described here can be
seen to undermine it.The present study is concerned with a particular feature
of this Gothic or noir moment of twenty-first century nature writing, namely
the figure of haunting.¹
Whereas critics widely agree that the ‘New Nature Writing’ marks a shift in
representing the natural world, the striking frequency with which spectral im-
agery and references to eerie,unexplainable presences or uncannydoubles ap-
pear in these predominantly nonfictional, often scientificallyoriented texts has
largelybeenneglectedinpreviousworksonthistopic.Apossiblereasonforthis
isthatacertaindegreeof‘hauntedness’hasalwaysbelongedtotherepertoireof
natureliteratureandisthusperceivedbycriticsasapointofcontinuitybetween
twenty-firstcenturywritersandthetraditionofnaturewriting,ratherthanadis-
tinctive and thus noteworthy feature of the former.Yet I would suggest that the
haunting which I seek to describe in this study presents both in its prevalence
and in its particular form aphenomenon specific tothis set of twenty-first cen-
Myuseoftheterms‘Gothic’and‘noir’hereisheuristic.Itdoesnotimplyaclassificationof
thesetextsasGothicornoirfiction.Suchclassificationwouldbeproblematic,notleastdueto
thenonfictionalcharacterofmostofmyprimarytexts.Myuseoftheterm‘noir’wasinspiredby
TimothyMorton’sreferencetothefilmnoirinEcologyWithoutNaturetowhichIreturnattheend
ofchapter1.
