We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
The body of writing about nature from Aristotle to Attenborough constitutes a cultural heritage which has had and continues to have multiple effects over the centuries on our thoughts and on our lives. It has in common the belief that there is ‘something out there’ called nature which can be studied in detail (however the descriptions come to be refined or varied over time) and analysed theoretically (however provisional or contradictory particular theories may prove to be). But interwoven with this – contradicting, confirming, influencing – there has been a long tradition of exploring why and how nature expresses something about ourselves as individuals and as human beings, including the hopes and expectations we project onto, or demand of, the reality out there. In poems, novels, plays and essays written throughout the centuries, ‘nature’ is the term used to give a voice to the full range of our most passionate feelings, to our basest as well as our highest thoughts. In the process, sometimes the attempt has been made to stand outside the closed room of those needs and give nature a voice.
As a result, literary tradition, the written creative expression of ourselves as human beings, constitutes a major cultural heritage of our preoccupation with nature. This preoccupation – this need to find in nature a mirror which clarifies and expresses the vagaries, pleasures and pains of our human condition – is a double mirror. Certainly, it reveals what we demand of nature as our reflection, but in the course of doing so it both exhibits and critiques what the modes of expectation embodied in our writing allow us to think and to feel about the natural world. The sequence of chapters in this book is committed to keeping that double mirror in mind. It explores the various ways using nature as a mirror has contributed to the images of ourselves and our society revealed in our literary culture; at the same time, it acknowledges how various pathetic fallacies of nature (a term used throughout this book and explained more fully in the Introduction) embodied in literary stances and tropes have contributed to our inherited understanding of the natural world.
To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.
Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.
Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.
