This paper discusses Richard Jefferies’s Nature near London (1883), a collection of essays describing the author’s long walks around his home in Surbiton. Although each essay is de- voted to a different topic, they all centre on the encounter – at times tense, at times surprising – between the city and the country. For Jefferies, this did neither entail a simple opposition between nature and culture, nor a nostalgic regret for times gone by; he explored the tensions between human progress and the environment in a moment of dramatic change, striving to envision how such change should be managed toward what he saw as true progress. Thus, categories such as urban and rural, local and global, tradition and progress, were never used to create simplistic oppositions: they were rather mobilised to make sense of a complex context including both human and non-human agents through time. With its emphasis on intercon- nectedness, Jefferies’s work forcibly asserted that nature should not be seen as separated from the human world, its values and history; for him, nature was truly a system, of which humans are part.
"Twelve miles from town". Tradition and progress in Richard Jefferies’s Nature near London (1883)
Silvia Granata
2022-01-01
Abstract
This paper discusses Richard Jefferies’s Nature near London (1883), a collection of essays describing the author’s long walks around his home in Surbiton. Although each essay is de- voted to a different topic, they all centre on the encounter – at times tense, at times surprising – between the city and the country. For Jefferies, this did neither entail a simple opposition between nature and culture, nor a nostalgic regret for times gone by; he explored the tensions between human progress and the environment in a moment of dramatic change, striving to envision how such change should be managed toward what he saw as true progress. Thus, categories such as urban and rural, local and global, tradition and progress, were never used to create simplistic oppositions: they were rather mobilised to make sense of a complex context including both human and non-human agents through time. With its emphasis on intercon- nectedness, Jefferies’s work forcibly asserted that nature should not be seen as separated from the human world, its values and history; for him, nature was truly a system, of which humans are part.I documenti in IRIS sono protetti da copyright e tutti i diritti sono riservati, salvo diversa indicazione.
