Reviving a Canon in New Nature Writing: The Cases For and Against Edward Thomas’ ‘Country Essay’

Abstract This article seeks to explore a tension within New Nature Writing, a contemporary British literary genre which has brought editorial success to literary non-fiction. On one side, a traditionalist group of authors who willfully enter in conversation with a previous, rediscovered canon of nature writing is identified; on the other, an opposing group which believes that new, unprecedented circumstances, aptly described by the term Anthropocene, require new sensibilities. Central to this debate, which echoes the friction between the first and the second wave of ecocriticism, is the legacy of Edward Thomas, a poet and essayist who has strongly influenced the work of Robert MacFarlane, and shaped the Romantic Ecology approach to non-fiction writing (the country essay, travel writing). The article will explore the influence of Thomas’ essay writing and understanding of nature on MacFarlane’s successful trilogy Landscape and the Human Heart , affiliated here with Jonathan Bate’s idea of Romantic Ecology, while also analyzing Kathleen Jamie’s widely shared response to his work succinctly titled “A Lone Enraptured Male,” which stands closer to what has been recently called ‘the Self-Conscious Anthropocene.’ Edward Thomas’ prose, in works such as The Heart of England (1906), serves as the backdrop to the negotiations of these new aesthetics and sensibilities within New Nature Writing.