Post-millennial Britain is a locus of flux and uncertainty, defined by environmental concerns, fears regarding terrorism, and the destabilisation of European politics on the one hand, and increasing globalisation, liberal approaches to minority groups, and rapid technological advances on the other. The fiction that is being created at this point, in this place, reflects these issues in numerous different manners and through a variety of thematic shifts. One of these developments is a renewed literary interest in British rural landscapes, particularly those landscapes that are in some regard problematic, either literally or figuratively. These landscapes are defined as edges.
This project examines the manner in which four novels employ British edge landscapes. Each chapter focuses on a particular novel and a particular landscape type, examining how the landscape functions within the text, and how the novel’s use of its place reflects post-millennial concerns. The project places the novels within a wider context of ecocritical principles and literary criticism, identifying both approaches specific to each individual text and prevailing tendencies that link the corpus. Ultimately the project delineates a preoccupation with uncertainty, and an attendant interest in the depiction of the particular, the individual experience and the local; it interrogates the ethics of this attention and marks the manner in which these texts both represent and remain complicit in the cultural elision of the consequences of human inhabitation in and interaction with their surroundings.
The project concludes by considering the manner in which the prevailing concerns of the texts reflect an attention that self-reflexively marks itself as difficult, personal and flawed, and the manner in which the texts reflect environmental concern and insecurity while resisting the urge toward polemical trajectories
