The Stranger Sea

: Nature writing, fiction and coastal retreat

Abstract

The novel The Stranger Sea works within and expands the boundaries of an idealised image of a coastal town, as a reflective and creative engagement with place which is composed of a frame narrative and interspersed with short stories, and accompanying critical commentary. The novel is a first-person fictional narrative, from the perspective of a woman living in the city, attempting to become her idealised version of a nature writer. The third-person short stories that appear as interludes are her creative explorations of the coast. This complicates the traditional form of nature writing, which generally uses first-person non-fiction narratives.
In my creative project, the pastoral motif of retreat and return is seen as a narrative movement, and applied to the idealised image of the coast, bringing into question why physical experience and ecological knowledge is prioritised over more cultural links to the environment. The collation of cultural, historical and experiential ways of understanding coastal landscapes develops into a palimpsest, mirrored in the form of the novel. This is further explored in the narrator’s experience of pregnancy, which realises her human body as nature, and her exploration of a feminine creative self. The novel approaches issues of how creative writing communicates and constructs nature, human and nonhuman interactions, while interrogating nature writing as a genre.
The narrator of the novel attempts to conform to her idealised version of a nature writer, which ultimately cannot be fulfilled, and is further complicated by the narrator’s sudden pregnancy. The narrator must contend with the figure of the nature writer to reconcile her approach to writing, and must articulate her conception of motherhood in order to decide whether to have a child. I focused my creative composition of the coast on history, memory, and emotional experience, which posits human experience of nature as a palimpsest. By focusing on a metaphorical experience of swimming and using fiction, I complicate genre conventions of nature writing, which focus on the physical movement of retreat and return. The narrator creates a sense of belonging to the coast through writing her experience of nature, pregnancy and the coast, without physically swimming.

Thesis embargoed. Available: 03/03/28

Date of Award	Feb 2026
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	University of Brighton
Supervisor	Amanda Hodgkinson (Supervisor)