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Independence and extinction in Scottish wilderness writing
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Gardiner, Michael (2023) Independence and extinction in Scottish wilderness writing. Etudes Anglaises, 76 (1). pp. 82-99. doi:10.3917/etan.761.0082 ISSN 0014-195X.
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Official URL: http://doi.org/10.3917/etan.761.0082
Abstract
Crises of British constitutional authority have often been crises of the state's foundational “empiricist metaphysics”—the assumption that the world should be progressively converted into objects for evaluation within standardized space. Environmental writers have touched on this, but tended to miss the binding of Britishness, empiricist progress, and the “extractive” logic of world-as-property—and that other great existential risk, nuclear weapons. Nuclear disarmament is perhaps the single clearest crack between the UK and one of its peripheral nations—Scotland—whose adjustment had been crucial in creating an eighteenth-century morality for commercial empire, but whose de-adjustment is felt in its slide towards independence . Understanding nuclear disarmament as an un-Britishing helps explain the twenty-first-century boom in Scottish writing on wilderness , or places which exceed evaluable space. Turning particularly to specific examples from recent poetry, this paper explores this antagonism between Scottish wilderness and “empiricist progress” towards extinction-level weapons.
Item Type: | Journal Article | ||||||
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Divisions: | Faculty of Arts > English and Comparative Literary Studies | ||||||
Journal or Publication Title: | Etudes Anglaises | ||||||
Publisher: | Editions Klincksieck | ||||||
ISSN: | 0014-195X | ||||||
Official Date: | 4 October 2023 | ||||||
Dates: |
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Volume: | 76 | ||||||
Number: | 1 | ||||||
Page Range: | pp. 82-99 | ||||||
DOI: | 10.3917/etan.761.0082 | ||||||
Status: | Peer Reviewed | ||||||
Publication Status: | Published | ||||||
Access rights to Published version: | Restricted or Subscription Access |
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