Bloomsbury Academic The Living World (Environmental Cultures): Nan Shepherd and Environmental Thought

Harnessing new enthusiasm for Nan Shepherds writing, this book asks how literature might help us to reimagine humanitys place on earth in the midst of our ecological crisis. The first book to examine Shepherds prose and fiction through an ecocritical lens, The Living World reveals forgotten details about the scientific, political and philosophical climate of early twentieth century Scotland, and offers new understandings of Shepherds distinctive environmental thought. With a focus on The Living Mountain, but touching upon The Weatherhouse, A Pass in the Grampians, poetry from In the Cairngorms, and Shepherds personal archive, Samantha Walton explores how Shepherds innovative and prescient nature writing can be better understood in light of new and multi-disciplinary environmental humanities approaches. More than this, this book proposes that Shepherds ways of relating to complex, interconnected ecologies predate many of the core themes and concerns of current science, environmental cultural studies, and philosophy, and may inform their future development. Broken down into chapters focuses on themes of place, planet, ecology, environmentalism, Deep Time, vital matter and selfhood, The Living World offers the first integrated study of Shepherds writing and legacy, making the work of this philosopher, feminist, amateur ecologist, geologist, and innovative modernist, accessible and relevant to a new community of readers. Review The Living Worldfirmly establishes Nan Shepherd's significance as an ecological writer whose relevance continues to grow as we move further into the Anthropocene. With an admirably light touch, Walton provides an accessible and detailed account of Shepherd's work, underpinned by extensive contextual research, close reading, and dialogue with contemporary ecocriticism.Pippa Marland, Research Fellow, University of Leeds, About the Author Samantha Walton is a Reader in Modern Literature at Bath Spa University. She is co-editor of the ASLE-UKI journal Green Letters and has held visiting scholarships at IASH, University of Edinburgh; The University of Aberdeen; and the Rachel Carson Center, Munich. She is author of Guilty But Insane: Mind Law in Golden Age Detective Fiction (2015) and is her book of poetry, Self-Heal was published in 2018.