Cold blood: adventures with reptiles and amphibians
- Submitting institution
-
Bath Spa University
- Unit of assessment
- 27 - English Language and Literature
- Output identifier
- 1320
- Type
- A - Authored book
- DOI
-
-
- Publisher
- Chatto & Windus
- ISBN
- 9780701187958
- Open access status
- Out of scope for open access requirements
- Month of publication
- May
- Year of publication
- 2014
- URL
-
-
- Supplementary information
-
-
- Request cross-referral to
- -
- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
- -
- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- No
- Number of additional authors
-
0
- Research group(s)
-
-
- Proposed double-weighted
- Yes
- Double-weighted statement
- In preparation for this monograph, and during the writing, I wrote onsite descriptions of wild animals and landscape at several Dorset heaths, Ashdown Forest, Romney Marsh, Dartmoor, Formby, Jersey and Sandscale Haws. I researched all the popular natural history books about these animals published since 1839, and some writings from the Early Modern period. I interviewed scientists and conservation workers, and researched evolutionary theory, reptiles in popular culture, and the law concerning non-native species. The writing itself involved extensive revision for the sake of the sound and balance of sentences, and for a balance between accurate science and personal narrative.
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- In nature writing, how can a balance be achieved between literary and scientific writing, so that each enriches and sometimes tempers the other without effacing it? Part of the innovativeness of the ‘New Nature Writing’ is its willingness to situate ecological and cultural knowledge in the experience of characters. This is the definitive task of the natural history memoir, a hybrid form at the forefront of nature writing’s resurgence. The largest aim is to help resolve the conflict of scales that torments environmental thinking – the distance between the spaces and time-scales of ecological processes and those of life-story and immediate experience.
Having, as an ecocritic, attempted to define and test the ‘new nature writing’, I aimed to honour the traditional impulse to solitude and sublimity while embedding the experiences in social life, historical specificity and the developing ecological crisis. In this I was influenced by Donna Haraway’s arguments about the need for science writers to situate themselves rather than present their observations as impersonal and unmediated.
I attempt these elusive balances in my hybrid memoir depicting my lifelong fascination with British reptiles and amphibians. Despite their richness of cultural meaning, it is the first work of ‘New Nature Writing’ devoted to these creatures. I explore their ecology and past and present meanings, making a defence of the value of (qualified) anthropomorphism. The animals are present for themselves, while functioning as symbol and metaphor for the child, the adult narrator and the reader. The book moves between the child’s perception and the adult’s; personal and evolutionary timescales; scientific objectivity and emotion. I explore and recreate ways in which stories of World War Two interacted with popular enthusiasm for wild nature.
The book found major publishers in hardback and paperback, and was adapted for serialisation on BBC Radio 4.
- Author contribution statement
- -
- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
- -
