Writing Landscape and Setting in the Anthropocene: Britain and Beyond

This edited collection will offer an in-depth exploration of the role of landscape and place as literary ‘settings’. It will examine the multifaceted relationships between authors, narrators, and characters to their locales, as well as broader considerations of the significance of the representation of landscape in a world deeply affected by human interventions. The collection will consist of case studies of projects engaging with these questions, as well as research examining the theoretical underpinnings of both creative practices/processes and post-textual analysis of published works.

In the context of the climate crisis and a pandemic which has caused us to re-evaluate the significance of landscape and environment, this collection could not come at a better time. Responding to the need to engage current trends within the academy and in border social debate, this collection will be multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary in scope. It will bring together internationally renowned scholars to explore the entanglements of people (authors, narrators and characters) and place within creative writing, providing explanations of how and why interactions with and perceptions of landscapes are a vital aspect of the writer’s practice and broader social conversations about our relationship/s to the environment.

The book is principally aimed at an academic audience and will be highly relevant to Masters level, doctoral students, and early careers researchers as well as established writers and lecturers. It will provide in-depth analysis of ecocritical theories of creativity, philosophies of embodied perception, literary traditions, climate writing and representations of identity through landscape.