Overview

Amidst the ongoing ecological crisis and other civilisational threats, this book adopts a tentatively optimistic and affirmative attitude to human-nature relations. The selection of early twentieth- and twenty-first century texts analysed by the contributors offers instances of the hopeful and restorative effects of human-nature encounters. Uniquely invoking the traditional concept of consolation, the authors demonstrate that the (re)turn to nature, which is typically a response to a personal or social challenge, takes different forms, ranging from nostalgia, escapism, anthropomorphic fantasies, transformative immersion in the wild coupled with environmental concerns, to personal testimonies, fictions about gardening, conservation, and environmental justice. From Conrad’s nostalgic yearning for the natural harmony inherent to sailing, the Kibbo Kift movement as a post-World War I programme of physical and moral regeneration, to contemporary celebration of a feminist hydrocommons and Black American farmers seeking justice through cultivating land, the chapters explore various attempts at overcoming the human-nature dualism, which, ultimately, inspires a cautiously hopeful outlook.

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9789004744103

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Šárka Bubíková is Associate Professor at the Department of British and American Studies, University of Pardubice. She currently specializes in crime fiction and has co-authored The Place It Was Done: Location and Community in Contemporary American and British Crime Fiction (2023). Bożena Kucała is Associate Professor at the Institute of English Studies at the Jagiellonian University in Krakow. Her research focuses on contemporary British fiction. She is the author of Of What Is Passing: Present-Tense Narration in the Contemporary Historical Novel (2023). Beata Piątek is Associate Professor at the Institute of English Studies at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków. Her main research interests range from cultural studies to British and Irish fiction. She is the author of History, Memory, Trauma in Contemporary British and Irish Fiction (2014).

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