13 - Nature Writing

Summary

Nature writing has been parodied for what Richard Kerridge identifies as ‘purple prose’. Given the remarkable resurgence of the popularity of nature writing in the first decades of this century, this chapter considers how nature writers now can develop a prose style that avoids the excesses traditionally associated with the genre and that will face up to and not shrink from the threats to nature, including ‘global warming and the huge loss of wildlife populations’, that demand perspectival shifts between the local and the global, the personal and the planetary.