Theologies of the Wild: Contemporary Landscape Writing

Some of the most engrossing literary geographies of the past three decades are to be found in contemporary landscape writing, non-fiction prose texts that are centrally concerned with the relationships between self and place, nature and culture. These texts share a preoccupation with “landscape” in a dual sense: as the material environments inhabited by humans and non-humans; and as a way of seeing spaces and places that is closely linked to pictorial or textual representation. They combine an attunement to the significance of embodied spatial practices, such as walking or wayfaring, with an acute awareness of the ways in which language and form mediate experience. Contemporary landscape writing often seeks to revalue and explore ordinary landscapes and everyday habitats, eschewing conceptions of natural landscapes as “wilderness.” However, the same texts also tend to employ a common set of quasi-religious tropes that imply a deeper network of associations linking ideas of landscape to the sacred, the mystical, and the extra-ordinary: theologies of the wild.