course material

1. Critically analyse assignment Identify: Negotiate and critically analyse
adoption in Britain
For this essay it must be 1500 words. It must have all three reading in the essay. Write an
essay-centered onanalysis of the close readings that bring all the sources together. It must
be written in formal essay style;however, the title is of your own choosing.First you will
read on the novel, then the notes on it, then on the 3 concepts. And that is when you have
tostate which of them out of the three to have chose to write about in the essay as well. They
would be eitherHuman-Nature Relation, Anthropocentrism or place. It must be clear in the
introduction(and/or essay title) whichconcept you are looking at.Then you will read up on
the Extract: Key thinkers on Space and Place in: Key thinkers on space & place/edited by
Phil Hubbard, Rob Kitchin & Gill Valentine. London: Thousand Oaks:Sage, 2004.pp306-
310,330-336.Here you look at the ideas and issues it is trying to articulate. Draw from it
directly in to the essay: citeit(quote passages) and work through them, referring them to the
other reading . Do they agree/contradicteachother. Analyse language closely, look for
particular pharases, use of first or second person pronoun. Thinkof any other effects
symbol, metaphor, lyricism etc. Look at the words, shapes, patterns, movements
fromparagraph/chapter to paragraph/ chapter, pay attention to its development.Please
have a reference page at the end.Notes on Edgelands.Vast in total area, but somehow
unnoticed, it is a mess of scattered wasteland, unkempt shrub and frayedgrassland,
randomly littered with the unloved infrastructural organs of our frantic society. Amid
scruffyfields, bits of woodland and overgrown derelict sites lie marshalling yards, car-
crushing establishments, sewagetreatment works and travellers’ encampments. There are
no visitor centres or tourist offices, but, instead, aself-seeded dreamscape has emerged.
Wildlife diversity here is often far greater than in the surroundingcountryside and many of
the structures are more fascinating than those of nearby towns and cities.Marion Shoard
(review of Edgelands, Oberserver 6 March, 2011).Background: Edgelands and the Question
of Human Contact with NatureSomething new is at stake. Twentieth century
environmentalism has successfully deleted the hubristic humansubject from the scene of
nature. In addition to this, ecologists have killed off an old version of what we usedto mean
by the word ‘nature’ ‘ something independent from us. So how now to fit the human back
into the site ofnature/ crisis / wellbeing via writing? This is an important question for
students of literature, particularlywhen looking at texts that we are claiming as
‘environmental’ texts. Stop for a moment to consider what isimportant about this question:

2. how might human technology (writing) enable particular relationships betweenhumans
and the more than- human to come into being, to be distilled into works of art, and thus to
come into ourcollective and individual mind (culture)? How are these texts mediated to us?
Who makes them available to us/how do we access them? Moreover, how might that double
cultural bind (writing-culture) relate to ‘nature’,whether this is a concept that no longer
holds ‘ as it has been deprived of its independence from us ‘ or whetherit is only conceivable
now, in our moment in history, as something partly constructed/created by Humans?.When
Alice Oswald’s writes on the academic reception of her work, she restates John Kinsella’s
rebuttal ofecocriticism’s distance from the real but named world ‘ referents ‘ that operate
within a poem, as they do withina world:Oswald: I’ m continually smashing down the
nostalgia in my head. And I amtrying to enquire of the landscape itself what it feels about
itself rather thanbringing in advertising skills. There’ s a whole range of words that
peopleuse about landscape. Pastoral? Idyll? I can’ t stand them.1
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2012/jul/13/alice-oswald-devonshire-
landscape.Kinsella: Language comes out of ”ecological processes” because they
arescientifically constructed views of nature in any given place ‘ it becomesimpossible to
separate language (poetic or otherwise) from the ecological.”Nature” as construct is surely
not the same form of discussion-point whenyou are ”inside” it: referents are realities and
have real implications interms of survival, and all genuine ”caring” about environments
isconditioned by the mode of publishing and broadcasting one’s views onwhat constitutes
those ”ecological processes of nature.”2To Kinsella, poetry is political consciousness, and
thus consciously beyond nature. By extension, Kinsella’salternative environmental
imaginary of Australis deconstructs a sense of poetry as art ‘about’ a world by movingin to
place and offering up the language of place itself.3 His is a difficult project for us to contend
withright now. Lets go back to Oswald: with less transparent and self-reflective emphasis
on how the human construct(poem) might attune to and attend the unfolding poeisis
(making) of the world, Oswald takes time to show you theperspective of woods and rivers
from the outside and the inside. Take a look at her work: her poetic maps andsongs of
natural elements (or the non-human) are drawn from deeply embodied relationships with
space that bringsforth the experience of place. Something speaks: it is not the person in
place (as with Jamie), and it is not aplace without the human; it seems to be the voice of
nature for humans, written in our language and yet helpingus to think in ways that are quite
different to the ways of thinking that have brought our species to sit on theverge of
planetary collapse. This world is one that we have (partly) created.Oswald has banned
‘pretty’ and ‘idyll’ from her vocabulary, but beauty survives because, “there’ s a kind
ofterror in beauty that I can cope with”. Immanent global crisis is not on Oswald’s mind;
however, ‘balance’,‘harmony’, ‘purity’ and particularly ‘calm’ are no longer on the horizon,
no longer present on the poet ofnature’s palette. Kathleen Jamie, too, resists the (somewhat
masculinised) urge to ‘escape’ and locate the wild.Turning to prose, seeing that there is
clearly something germane to poetry and other forms of language, Jamie isinvective when
reading Robert Macfarlane’s The Wild Places, in 2007:There’s nothing wild in this country
[Scotland]: every square inch of it is‘owned’, much has seen centuries of bitter dispute; the
whole landscape isman-made, deforested, drained, burned for grouse moor, long cleared of

3. itspeasants or abandoned by them. It’s turned into prairie, or designated by thisor that
acronym; it’s subject to planning regulations and management plans.It’s shot over by
royalty, flown over by the RAF [Royal Air Force, UK], or2 See John Kinsella, ‘The School of
Environmental Poetics and Creativity’, Angelaki:Journal of the Theoretical Humanities 14.2
(2009): 143-148. Text available
here:https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09697250903282168#.UzNdIPSSw7
o3 For more information, take a look at Kinsella’s dwelling project as documented by
TomBristow in The Australasian Journal of Ecocriticism and Cultural Ecology, PDFavailable
for download from this link:https://www.nla.gov.au/openpublish/index.php/aslec-
anz/article/view/2692trampled underfoot in the wind-farm gold-rush. [‘] And if we do find
aWild Place, we can prance about there knowing that no bears or wolves willappear over
the bluff, because we disposed of the top predators centuriesago, and if we do come unstuck
there’s a fair chance that, like the man onBen Nevis, we’ll get a mobile signal, and be
rescued.4Critical of the Cambridge-based writer speaking of Scotland, Jamie’s review offers
adetailed thumbnail sketch of the post-pastoral in Britain i.e. landscape and countryside
that is no longer aspace that is remote/ distanced/ disconnected from the
‘noise’/pollution/technology/presence of humans. InBritain, according to Jamie, there is no
outside to culture: we have gone everywhere.Let’s take a step away form the ‘natural
environment’ of wide spaces, far beyond ourcities and places of work. Let’s consider
edgelands: the peripheral sites withincityscapes, and the bleeding, fading edges of urban
environments that dissolve into the rural (if such a thing ‘‘rural’ ‘ still exists) and less human
populated spaces. It might be enough for us to consider these spaces as ahybrid of the
binary opposites of rural and urban (if these terms can actually hold anymore); they might
alsooffer our thought processes a little more evidence of landscape as ‘man-made’, of the
invisibility or nonpresence of the wild.Outline: Edgelands: Journeys into England’s True
WildernessA British TraditionGeography has wielded a signifier for the urban phenomenon
‘edgelands’ describedabove: ‘the interstitial interfacial zone between urban and rural’
(Shoard)5. As Frances Spalding has noted,while the term is new, the space in the British
imagination, freshly brandished by discourses upon this word,has been present for some
time: Somehow we know immediately the meaning of ‘edgelands’. The wordevokes zones
where overspill housing estates peter out or factories give wayto black fields or scrubland;
where unkempt areas become home to allotments, mobile-phone masts, sewage
works,cooling towers, dens, places of forgetting, dumping and landfill.64 Kathleen Jamie, ‘A
Lone Enraptured Male’, London Review of Books, 30.5 (March,2008), 25-27.5 Marion
Shoard, ‘Edgelands of Promise’ Landscapes 1.2 (2000): 74-93. See also:Shoard et al.,
‘Inspiring England’ s urban fringes: multi-functionality and planning’ LocalEnvironment:
The International Journal of Justice and Sustainability 9.3 (2004): 217-233.6 The full text of
Frances Spalding’s review in the Independent (25 February 2011) isavailable
here:https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/reviews/edgelands-
journeysinto-englands-true-wilderness-by-paul-farley-and-michael-symmons-
2224516.htmlA small island, a large community; is there any space in the UK that remains
untouched by humans? Is there anyspace that sustains life in an ecological fashion that
appears historic, or pre-historic? These might not be theright questions. Perhaps, we might

4. ask this: does ‘nature’ survive in ‘unkempt areas’, sights of ruin, pollutionand decay?Mabey
informs the work of Robert Macfarlane and the writers of Edgelands: Journeys Into
England’s TrueWilderness, Paul Farley and Michael Symmons Roberts. In their analysis of
the ‘double life’ of canals ‘ adoptedas natural features where they cut through the
countryside, dumping grounds when found in urban spaces – Farleyand Symmons Roberts
question how this ‘broken network’ can be ‘reconnected and revived’ (118). It is as if
thisonce energised, productive, culturally important machine network (based on natural
resources, i.e. the river,and the wood of the boats) invites the authors into a weird version
of nostalgia: to reclaim the past (theenergy, the vibrancy) and yet not to step back into the
lifeways of the past. How to move forward in thiscomplicated ethical and intellectual
terrain? The approach seems to be this: to offer a critically antinostalgictext, which enables
a two-fold binary to be explored: past and present, rural and urban. This is exemplified
inthe author’s particular representation of an imaginary realm that seeks ‘romance’ on the
canal’s narrow boats:Just as the ancient frost fairs allowed for revelry and licentiousness,
because the law of the land did notextend to frozen lakes and rivers, so life on a canal seems
to offer an escape from convention and restriction.Walk past a mooring and your eye is
drawn behind the lace curtains, where couples who have dodged the rat racewave to you,
their matching bicycles strapped to the deck of the garishly painted Lady of Shallot,
kettlewhistling on the stove, and an open copy of The Wild Places on the table. Now, across
England’s canal network,boat-hire companies let you taste this reverie for anything from
half a day to a fortnight. (118)Yes, the backbone of the world’s first industrial nation has
been reduced to leisureproduct, to afford an affected bourgeois-conservative lifestyle ‘ who
would havereckoned?Farley and Symmons Roberts seek to expose an ideology here: the
possibility of escape to past-times. Tennyson’s1833 ballad recasts Arthurian legend to
evoke a lost England and incite a medieval British imaginary; and yethis emphasis on
material conditions ‘ ‘Long fields of barley and rye, That clothe the world and meet the sky’
(1-3) suggests something beyond nostalgia. It portends a poetic subject cognate with
Farley’s and Symmons Roberts’connections between industrial capital, utilitarianism and
human needs in Edgelands. However, Tennyson’s poem ismobilised for its superficial sense
of nostalgia; rather than look to a past ‘ whether to articulate anunrealised potential in the
present (Tennyson’s real subject) or for historical values ‘ the authors of Edgelandshave a
singular project in mind: to keep focus on the modern. Their attention is firmly fixed on the
fibre-optics underneath the canal towpaths connecting cities, companies and communities
(119); not on the less worldy(i.e. less human-oriented) repose of the predigital age. It is thus
that Macfarlane’s text, The Wild Places(2007) is sarcastically framed within an anti-
nostalgic, a-Romanticised space that belies the celebration of theedgelands as constructed,
unreal, fragmentary.Clarifying the SpaceEdgelands undertakes many excursions through
terrains and academic disciplines toarticulate anti-nostalgia. In the chapter ‘Ruins’ ‘ do think
about this title! ‘ genomicsoffers fresh ground for polemical attack on conservative
thinking.Taking into account the term ‘progressive detachment’, Farley and Symmons
Roberts unpack a naturalist’s sense offreedom, of being out in the open, within (and part of)
the wild. The underlying idea is this: genetic faultsand errors switch off certain parts of the
genome over time, which results in a species being alienated frominstinctive behaviour:If a

5. blackbird’s genome dictates that at the first sign of spring it must make acup-shaped nest
lined with mud and grass, then that’s what it will do. Oncethat part of the genome is
inactive, the animal is simultaneously blessed andcursed. If you lose the deep, instinctive
pull to make a certain kind of shelterin a certain place at a certain time, then you can, in
theory, make whateverkind of shelter you can think of, from an igloo to a skyscraper.
(165)Next time you are in a philosophical mood, turn to this quotation and think about
therelationship that life has with history. In Farley’s and Symmons Roberts’ words
‘liberation from instinctivebehaviour’ leads to ‘the birth of civilisation’. Humans, in
theauthors’ view, have evolved from a deep map of instincts; yet, due to the pull, we ‘wax
lyrical about hills,forests, rivers, moors?’ Moreover, and more wittily, the authors claim that
if genetic science had not createdthe term ‘it would have been necessary for wilderness
writers to invent it.’ Note that term: ‘wilderness’.Homesickness, the wild places and the
pursuit to be feral are all claimed as nostalgicyearning in Edgelands; as a ‘misanthropic
edge.’ (166). The authors have established a clear polemical space intowhich they can
situate their manifesto of edgelands urbanism:We would like to start a counter-movement.
Rather than escaping to theforests of the Highlands, park your car at Matalan and have a
walk around theedgelands woods. This has the added advantage that you won’t die
ofexposure if you take a wrong turn. And if we must visit mountains, let’s makesure there’s
always a caf’ near the summit, so we can have a drink and enjoythe company of our fellow
travellers. Snowdon has already taken this bold step. Now all we need is a Premier Innon
the top of Ben Nevis and a LittleChef on Scafell Pike. Let the campaign begin.If the reader is
deaf to satire they might be mistaken to read only a sarcastic tone. It’s worth our time
lookingat this closely. The critique of nostalgia is coupled to a critique of unbridled
fetishisation of consumerist,late capitalist security ‘ a cultural practice that comes at a
significant cultural cost. Such is the challengeto our reception, enjoyment and involvement
in nature today. We shall endeavour to consider whether thisposition, which is understood
well by British poets, is internalised in prose forms of new nature writing egEdgelands, or if
there is something quite different operating in prose inquiries into the human experience
ofthe late natural world.Farley and Symmons Roberts step close towards clich’ when they
write ‘we take themetaphors for our lives from the language we inherit, but we shape and
colour them from our own experience’ (32).The emphasis here on experience, a world
formed through movement and action, is underlined by the authors’polemic: they are
speaking of the need to break free from traditional forms of writing, in-so-doing they
areadvocating for new forms of nature, or the acceptance of post-nature in our lives (or
ours in its). Thismodernism is central to the critical impulse in Edgelands that negates
nostalgia and, albeit amusingly, assertssome value in the understated, undervalued and
overlooked places of becoming:Well, our spiritual path would be a track worn down by dog-
walkers andschoolkids, on the outskirts of a north-west English conurbation. It wouldstart
on scrappy grass, then weave its way through a copse of feral trees.Every now and then a
makeshift den or tree house can be seen, or a watertower looming where the trees peter
out. Charred bonfire patches crop upone on side or the other and the sky is overcast above.
(33)It is clearly their home territory; a place known well and revealing a range of elements ‘
the site of play,unkempt green, the feral and the tatty, the edge of nature and ubiquitous

6. energy technology, the signs of thetemperate climate ‘ things that are hardly surprising to
them.A Counterpoint to the discourse of EdgelandsRobert Macfarlane celebrates Edgelands
as a promiscuous ‘delight.’ He also shapes his review of the text toclarify two things: the
extent to which this geographical term and literary approach is innovative, or modern;and
his own opinion on emotion andlandscape.Farley and Symmons Roberts are not the first to
venture into the edgelands, nor is the region nearly as ignoredas they suggest. For decades
the edgelands7 NB If you are unfamiliar with the culture that Farley and Symmons Roberts
are drawingupon, don’t be defeated: use the internet to find out what is meant by all the
proper nameshere: ‘Matalan’, ‘Snowdon’, ‘Premier Inn’, ‘Ben Nevis’, ‘Little Chef’ and ‘Scafell
Pike.7have been crawling with chroniclers: psychogeographers,biopsychogeographers,
autobiopsychogeographers, deep topographers, andother theoretically constituted lovers of
the detrital, gleaning theirruminations on ruination.8While reaching far and wide to
underline that the cultural space has been well theorisedand explored through various
literary modes, Macfarlane draws from a range of (male)writers and filmmakers that are
transforming the nature writing tradition in the UK;Patrick Keiller, Chris Petit, Richard
Maybe, Kenneth Allsop and Iain Sinclair are alllisted as exponents of a ‘modish’ and
‘debatable space’, which he qualifies as follows:brownfield sites and utilities infrastructure,
crackling substations and palletdepots, transit hubs and sewage farms, scrub forests and
sluggish canals,allotments and retail parks, slackened regulatory frameworks and
guerillaecologies.To dispense with the popularity of the urban outskirts of liminal Britain
for a moment; aspreviously indicated: there is a critique of capital operating here. The fall-
out fromindustry, economic cycles, the political shortcomings of ‘regulatory’ policies ‘
allperhaps requiring scrutiny rather than unchecked celebration.Macfarlane follows this up,
in what might be construed as further conservatism, thatwhich is identified by Patrick
Wright: ”the New Baroque sensibility,’ characterised by aromancing ‘interest in debris and
human fallout’9 wherein the ‘thought-crimes’ oftraditional landscape writing i.e. ‘the editing
out of particular people, the excesses of thelyrical impulse’, are ‘re-performed’ in ‘just a new
setting.’ Thnk about this: all theseauthors (as is Jamie) are concerned with placing the
human BACK into the environment.As far as a literary tradition is concerned, it reminds us
just exactly how radicalWordsworth’s and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads were in placing the
troubled conditions ofpastoral spaces at the centre of their collection, which heralded the
dawn of new Britishpoetry at the end of the eighteenth century.10Moving OnTo recoil
before moving forwards: we are now aware of a debate amongst contemporaryBritish
writers concerning spatial preferences for lyrical and non-lyrical treatment; aconcern for
mode ‘ the politics of celebration, critique or the known site of experience inthis post-
natural age; and the need to bring together these two items to clarify how andwhy space
and the experience it affords can be named wild, wilderness or simply the falloutof urban
developments, the fading noise of built environments that interface withmore green, less
busy places.8 https://www.theguardian.com/books/2011/feb/19/edgelands-farley-
symmons-SymmonsRoberts-review9 Macfarlane is citing Patrick Wright’s novel, A Journey
Through Ruins: The Last Daysof London (1991).10 The frontispiece of volume 1 of the 1802
edition is a case in point.8Alongside Marion Shoard, the other presiding spirit to Edgelands
is Richard Mabey.Most particularly, The Unofficial Countryside (1973): a ‘study’ of the

7. ‘vitality and worthof urban edges’ (5) the Edgelands authors note; however, they concede
that Mabey’sfocus ‘was on the resilience of nature in these waste places, rather than a
celebration ofthe places themselves’ (6). Thus, Farley and Symmons Roberts wish to take
that finalstep: to celebrate new spatial formations, ‘to break out of the duality of rural
andurban landscape writing’ to explore the unobserved or unnoticed, the
unremarkableedges of cities that are ‘places of possibility, mystery, beauty’. ‘ An aside: this
pointabout mystery might make us think that while we seem to instinctly know what our
home is, and when we ‘feel athome’, our home is the most unfamiliar place to us. ‘ While
Macfarlane is critical of two aspects to this project– the modish mode (celebration of
detritus) and the emphasis on space as subject (erasure of the human) ‘Edgelands also
appears to be spatialising nature by moving away from the detailed naturalist tones of
Mabey’sawe-inspired exposition of flora and fauna thriving in these city-spaces, moving
towards a geographic framealigned to socio-economic discourse.11Questions of connection
and escapism (detachment)Macfarlane hits back: his text has been tarnished with the word
‘escapist’ ‘ to write of a solitary walker inbroad open spaces is ‘misanthropic’ it puts humans
at a distance, it ignores the reality of our urban and highlypopulated experiences;
Macfarlane claims Edgelands has the same problem: it removes humans from the scene
ofinquiry. But is Edgelands escapist? Is it simply a form of connection to post-nature in
contemporaryenvironments?To clarify, Farley and Symmons Roberts quote from Kathleen
Jamie’s Tree House (2004)‘ to explore the ‘unique vista’ offered by a den ‘ and if the post-
industrial wastelands of Edgelands are onething, they are the childhood den of its authors.
Once up high in the tree, the human fades out and thelandscape comes forth:I was
unseeable. A bletted fruithung through the tangled branchesjust out of reach. Over house
roofs:sullen hills, the firth draineddown to sandbanks. ‘The Tree House’ (ref)The adult eye
is keen to observe things gone to seed (fruit over-ripening) and to offer a post-Romantic
(i.e.not idealised) entanglement of nature and culture (the drained coastal water). And this
immersion into anecological ‘ or at very least relational ‘ perspective, rather than either
collapsing human subjectivity ortaking on the view of nature, issomething afforded by the
environment. It is a space for children during certain times11 Richard Mabey: ‘the greatest
shock in the present transformation is that it has comeabout not so much from an invasion
by urban sprawl or industrial development, but frominsidious and often unobserved
changes in the internal workings of the countryside itself’(The Common Ground, London,
Hutchinson, 1980, 22).9of the year. Farley and Symmons Roberts’ ‘den-building’ is part of
the practice oftemperate summers, for ‘that border ditch could flood with rainwater or
agricultural runoffcome autumn; [and] no amount of tarpaulin could withstand a winter
gale’ (40). Theterms of their nostalgia are quite apposed to what they appear to be
suggesting ofMacfarlane: den-building is seasonal; and it can be remembered within one’s
ownlifetime, can be reimagined and connected to adult life experience wherein a
morecritical, spatial eye can bring a post-Industrial perspective to the site of play. This is
not to confused withyearning for lost genomes.Nostalgia and degrees of connection or
immersion are key operating concepts inEdgelands. Reworking these varying modes of
human expression and relation does notby necessity require a critique of a solitary figure
walking out into the wide, untouchedspaces of nature, and yet the figure of the masculine

8. walker out in the wilds is never toofar from satirical exposition of the impossibility ‘ and the
irrelevance to urbanism ‘ ofnoble savagery or ‘hermitic and lonely journeying’ (41).12 In
part, this indirect critique ofnature-fetishism is attentive to the need for adults to be
resourceful in either recreating orsimply accessing the spaces ‘of solitude and apartness’
that they once found so easilywhen children. Our near-past life has been packaged up, sold
back to us and incorporatedinto the rhetoric of engagement with nature:In 2006 the
Forestry Commission issued a booklet titled ‘Rope, Swings,Dens, Treehouses and Fires’,
which carried the detumescent subtitle ‘A riskbasedapproach for managers facilitating self-
built play structures andactivities in woodland settings’. A tree is ‘a den on legs’. The
bookletcorrelates den-construction and den location and use into levels of ‘low
risk’,‘medium risk’ and ‘high risk’. On this scale, ‘low risk’ means dens built fromnatural
materials, ‘such as branches, bracken, leaves and other vegetation’,while the use of pallets,
old kitchen units or, worse still, metals and asbestosand cars, together with tunnelling and
deep excavations, takes the den into the‘high risk’ category. Edgelands dens would typically
fail these building regs,being of necessity a bricolage of available natural materials and
human waste.Reading this booklet, you realise how far we have come from
publicinformation films warning of the dangers of children entombing themselves12 Feel
empowered: go to google scholar and look up ‘noble savage’, think about theEuropean
debates in the late eighteenth century (and look at the dates betweenRousseau’s writing
and the publication of Wordsworth’s and Coleridge’s LyricalBallads). These historical
dialogues remain relevant today.10in fly-tipped refrigerators on waste ground. You also
realise how separate ourofficial countryside is from our edgelands. (43)And this is a
meeting point between Edgelands and Macfarlane: that there is anotherworld beyond this
marketed, risk-managed nature. Farley and Symmons Roberts disputethe implicit binary
and self-evident dualism in the phrase ‘human-nature relations’;Macfarlane takes us away
from this theoretical noise to allow a clear voice of humantraversednature present itself for
our listening.