Critical Survey

The purpose of this article is to consider walking artist Hamish Fulton’s ‘walk-texts’ as ethical responses to the environment. In light of the environmental crisis that manifests in the proposed stratigraphic designation ‘Anthropocene’, Jane Bennett’s writing on enchantment offers a direction for thinking about how an ecologically ethical sensibility might be cultivated. Fulton’s communicative response to his walking art, I argue, embodies the discernment of ‘things in their sensuous singularity’ that Bennett identifies as a key attribute of enchantment. Yet, in his own writing on his art practice, the walk-texts are conceived as secondary – a necessary counterpart to walking as an experiential activity. By honing in on two recurring strategies we find in Fulton’s Cairngorm walk-texts – the list and the return – I argue that his work offers a linguistic mode that holds great potential for tuning us to environmental ethics in the Anthropocene.

In recent years, theologians have begun to interest themselves in the sacred yet avowedly non-confessional nature of much environmental writing, and the present article addresses this field of enquiry via a critical engagement with Ken Cockburn and Alex Finlay’s project The Road North (2010–2011). Appropriating Matsuo Bashō’s The Narrow Road to the Deep North to modern Scotland, Cockburn and Finlay distance their ‘pilgrimage’ from institutional religion yet engage with a tradition of contemplative practice, from the spirituality of the Desert Fathers to the manuals of Zen monasticism. In this article, we will draw on Finlay’s description of his work as ‘non-secular’ to develop a hermeneutic of the sacred in recent nature poetry. We will argue that while non-secular engagements with environment may educe forms of ‘ritual looking’ comparable to those practised by the religious mystic, a demurral of the ‘end’ and purpose of pilgrimage distinguishes this nonsecular from the theological ‘contemplation of nature’ to which it gestures.

In order to understand Earth’s increasingly unpredictable climate, we must accept natural chaos and anthropogenic disturbance as a key component of our ecological and social future. Just as Heidi C.M. Scott’s Chaos and Cosmos (2014) powerfully demonstrates that a postmodern view of chaotic nature is shown to have been harbouring Romantic and Victorian literary foundations, this article further suggests that chaos ecology also has its roots in the Gothic. Drawing on Algernon Blackwood’s collection Pan’s Garden: A Volume of Nature Stories (1912), it tentatively begins to unearth some of the ways in which ‘walking with Pan’ could be anticipatory of ecological concepts recognised today. By rereading transcendental Pan from the context of a ‘Gothic ecology’, it explores how Blackwood transforms nature into a supernaturally powerful, inviting and terrifying character. In doing so, it becomes clear that disturbing Pan’s garden may have far greater consequences for Blackwood’s human wayfarers than for nature itself.

This article considers the writing of Dorothy Edwards (1903–1934). The uniquely strange narrative worlds of Edwards’ fictions have hitherto evaded systematic and coherent analysis. The article considers evidence from Edwards’ letters and from her works Rhapsody (1927) and Winter Sonata (1928) in order to suggest that the storyworlds are fundamentally conditioned, on the levels of both theme and narration, by Edwards’ experiences as a sufferer from depression. The article concludes with a consideration of the centrality of walking as an activity that has the potential to maintain both the existence of the storyworlds and also the mental health of both characters and author.

The natural world behaves in unexpected ways in twentieth-century Irish women’s fiction about girlhood. Girls are at once reduced to natural resources, ripe for exploitation, and instructed relentlessly in their social duties, which more often than not require they resist their ‘natural’ urges. The novels considered here – Holy Pictures by Clare Boylan, Down by the River by Edna O’Brien, and The Dancers Dancing by Eilis Ni Dhuibhne – feature girls moving towards the assumption of the roles of wife and mother they are expected to play as mature women. The girls walk roads of many colours through green landscapes that inspire contradictory responses of rebellion against and weary acceptance of their culture’s messages about a woman’s ‘natural’ place in post-Independence Ireland.

This is a jointly authored practice-led article by a poet and artist who have produced place-based work based on slow-walking practices for exhibition and publication since 2011. It is developed out of close reading of our own work, our key consideration being whether and how collaborative walking and art together might be conceived of as counter-cultural. We consider our walking inheritance, from the Romantics, via Thoreau to mid-century painters and poets and contemporary ecocritical theorists including Doreen Massey, Yi-fu Tuan, Deirdre Heddon and Richard Kerridge. We trace changes in theoretical and artistic approaches to walking, perception and making art together. We reference other contemporary poet and artist pairings including Frances Presley and Irma Irsara and Thomas A. Clark and Laurie Clark. Finally, we consider how walking and working collaboratively in different artistic media might produce work that challenges and affects viewers in gallery and book spaces.