Landscape Poetics: Scottish Textual Practice 1928–Present

by Monika Szuba

Landscape Poetics is an interdisciplinary study that seeks to place Scottish writers in relation to their landscape, by investigating how the self is entwined in place. By examinining the writing and practice of particular modern and contemporary authors in the light of environmental thought, the study explores their lived, organic connection to the landscape. Landscape Poetics presents an argument that the relationship between author and world is expressed through the language of vibrant and engaged experience. Shepherd, MacCaig, Jamie, Clark and Finlay are seen as reinventing the perception of the landscape by proposing that the subject is no longer involved in the act of objectification, but is instead an embodied self that enters place, perceiving it more fully.

248 pages, Hardcover

Published November 8, 2023

About the author

Monica Szuba is lecturer in English Literature at the University of Gdansk. Her research covers 20th and 21st century Scottish and English poetry and prose, with a particular interest in ecocriticism informed by environmental humanities and phenomenological perspectives. She was Berdnarowski Trust Fellow at the University of Aberdeen (2015-16). She is co-editor with Julian Wolfreys of The Poetics and Politics of Space and Place in Scottish Literature (Palfrave, 209) and Reading Nineteenth-Century Literature: Essays in Honour of J. Hills Miller (EUP, 2019). She is the author of Contemporary Scottish Poetry and the Natural World: Burnside, Jamie, Robertson and White (EUP, 2019).