Editorial: Creative Writing and Art --- Special Focus Issue on “European New Nature Writing"

In his famous book A Natural History of Nature Writing (1995), Frank Stewart affirms that this genre conveys the effort to fathom the “lack of ease” that our culture carries in itself when facing the natural world—a world that we feel neither as entirely familiar, nor as entirely other from us. Nature writers, Stewart maintains, “struggle to resolve the deep issue of this in-betweenness, a resolution crucial to the physical and spiritual survival of our world” (xv). For a long part of its evolutionary history, ecocriticism—a typical form of critical “in-betweenness” of nature and culture—has been itself a mode of nature writing. As if united to one another by a subtle but porous membrane, the creative dimension and the critical practice have shared ideas of wilderness, pastoral and anti-pastoral visions, animal encounters, explorations of territories outside (or invisibly inside) synthetic urban landscapes, and more or less explicit forms of environmental activism. Recently this porosity has expanded to the new conceptualizations of “nature,” and once again ecocriticism and nature writing have met one another on a terrain “less spiritual and more concerned with natural history” (Stenning and Gifford, “Editorial” 1), one in which, as the guest-editors write in their Introduction, “the tensions of nature and place, [...] in a global environmental culture can [...] be addressed”.