Stories we live and die by: ‘salience’ and ‘conviction’ in nature writing

In this paper, we explore nature writing as a specific contemporary genre and contextualise the writing of the Scottish author Kathleen Jamie within the larger framework of the genre. Jamie embraces her “northernness” and “marginalness” (Dósa 2009) by focusing on the realm of non-human on the fringes of Europe, thus re-learning to see the world and constituting a new ‘poetics of noticing’. The aim of the study is to extract a cluster of linguistic and literary features from selected essays (Findings (2005) and Sightlines (2012)) by Kathleen Jamie to represent ‘salience’ and ‘conviction’ (Stibbe 2015) within the theoretical frameworks of ecolingustics and ecosophy. In search of new stories to live and die by, nature writing, therefore, is proposed to function as an important medium in constructing salience, beliefs and convictions about how humans perceive their (dis)place(ment) in nature as well as their inner and outer landscape. / Keywords: nature writing, Kathleen Jamie, poetics of noticing, salience, conviction, ecolinguistics, ecosophy