New Forms of Environmental Writing: Gleaning and Fragmentation

Environmental Cultures

by Timothy C. Baker, Richard Kerridge (Editor), Greg Garrard (Editor)

Surveying a wide range of contemporary poetry, fiction, and memoir by women writers, this book explores our most pressing environmental concerns and shows how these texts find innovative new ways to respond to our environmental crisis.
Arguing for the centrality of individual encounter and fragmentary form in 21st-century literature, as well as themes of attention, care, and loss, Baker highlights the ways that fragmentary texts can be seen as a mode of resistance. These texts provide new ways to consider the role of individual agency and enmeshment in a more-than-human world.
The author proposes a new model of 'gleaning' to encompass ideas of collection, assemblage, and relinquishment and draws on theoretical perspectives such as ecofeminism, new materialism and posthumanism. Examining works by writers including Sara Baume, Ali Smith, Elizabeth-Jane Burnett, Bhanu Kapil and Kathleen Jamie, Baker provides important new insights into understanding our planetary predicament.

250 pages, Paperback

Published December 28, 2023

About the author

Timothy C. Baker holds a personal Chair in Scottish and Contemporary Literature at the University of Aberdeen. He has published widely on contemporary Scottish and American writing. He has completed projects on Scottish Gothic and twenty-first-century animal fiction. His current research is focused on representations of climate change and the natural world in contemporary women's writing.