Nature Writing
Nature writing is a literary genre of the fictional or non-fictional description of nature. Not easily translatable from the Anglo-Saxon language area, it describes a literary genre that expressly turns away from the modern, purely scientific method and refers back to older traditions from the 18th and 19th centuries, where it mixes with disciplines such as natural history and natural philosophy . Characteristic of nature writing is the person observing, describing and feeling nature as a subject, which also results in an essential difference in form from the objective approach of natural science . Today, as then, nature writing has a wide spectrum from simple travel and adventure descriptions to essay-like or poetic works to deep reflections on nature. Both the incorporation of historical and scientific facts and their subjective perception by a first-person narrator are a stylistic, creative feature. It is characterized by a decidedly ecological perspective, according to which every living being, however insignificant or ugly, has a very special meaning within a larger whole - in a purely earthly sense or even beyond .
Pioneers
Jean-Jacques Rousseau , Alexander von Humboldt and Henry David Thoreau are certainly among the classics of nature writing . Because of the flowing transitions to general natural history and philosophy, the first beginnings go back to the 18th century. So include Gilbert White in the UK and William Bartram in America certainly among the earliest Nature Writers. A significant part of these beginnings was the exploration of the newly developed continents with their largely foreign flora and fauna, which is why nature writing became particularly popular in the respective home countries, especially in the Anglo-Saxon region.
Other important authors of Nature Writing are:
- August Johann Rösel von Rosenhof (1705–1759)
- Carl von Linné (1707–1778)
- Jacob Christian Schäffer (1718–1790)
- Georges-Louis Leclerc de Buffon (1727–1775)
- Adalbert Stifter (1805–1868)
- Charles Darwin (1809-1882)
- Susan Fenimore Cooper (1813-1894)
Recent developments
In the course of growing environmental awareness , there seems to be a return to historical approaches and writings. This is also clearly reflected in the sales figures and bestseller lists. In the German-speaking area, the following are particularly important:
- Jürgen von der Wense (1894–1966)
- Wilhelm Lehmann (1882–1968)
From the time of the youth movement around the First World War, and contemporary:
- Brigitte Kronauer (1940-2019)
- Peter Wohlleben (* 1964)
- Judith Schalansky (* 1980)
In English the following are particularly popular:
- Richard Mabey
- Mary Oliver (1935-2019)
- Roger Deakin
- Mark Cocker
- Oliver Rackham
- Annie Dillard (* 1945)
Writers by Nature: British Council Scholarship
In 2018, the British Council offered 6 up-and-coming young authors a scholarship and workshops for exchange in nature writing.
See also
Web links
- To write about nature means to write about people
- Wanderlust
- Nature utopia on Monte Verità
- The Invention of Nature: Big Picture Science, with Passion
- The Forgotten Father of Romantic Environmentalism