New Forms of Environmental Writing: Gleaning and Fragmentation

Exploring a variety of environmental concerns and surveying a wide range of contemporary poetry, fiction, and memoir by women writers, this book argues for the centrality of individual encounter and fragmentary form in 21st-century literature. In accounts of both solitude and community, these texts find new ways to respond to the present in the absence of explanatory narratives. The work examined here provides new ways to consider questions of attention, care, and loss: rather than emphasising planetary change, they highlight the role of individual agency and enmeshment in a more-than-human world.

Proposing a new model of 'gleaning' to encompass ideas of collection, assemblage, and relinquishment, this book moves from accounts of individual encounters to collective care, and considers questions of the archive, classification systems, performance, and storytelling. In doing so, it highlights the way fragmentary texts can be seen as a mode of resistance. Including analyses of works by both familiar and emerging writers, including Sara Baume, Ali Smith, Elizabeth-Jane Burnett, Bhanu Kapil, Kathleen Jamie, and many others, this book also draws on theoretical perspectives such as ecofeminism, new materialism, posthumanism, and affect theory.