About

This project investigates the antecedents for contemporary affective ecocriticism as documented in narratives of sensory experience of the natural world in the period 1876-1938. Framed by Julius Bernstein’s The Five Senses of Man (1876) and Lucien Febvre’s “Une vue d’ensemble: Histoire et psychologie” (1938), I suggest that this period produced texts evidencing Mary Louise Pratt’s suggestion that the site of encounter with new geographies, the ‘contact zone’, is “the space in which people geographically and historically separated come into contact with each other and establish ongoing relations” (Pratt, 1992: 6). Within the discourses of empire frequently re-inscribed within narratives of encounter, sensory experience of the natural world exposes a site of ambivalence with the potential to invite empathy with inhabitants of unfamiliar geographies.

I investigate this potential through interdisciplinary practice, weaving close readings of a range of novels, short stories, and travel writings, with close attention to the material object. Contextualised through engagement with the medical antiquities of the Wellcome Collection, my readings of writers including Olive Schreiner, Rudyard Kipling, W H Hudson, E M Forster, D H Lawrence, Katherine Mansfield, Stella Benson, Freya Stark and Marianne North emerge to expose the relationship between sensory experiences and an empathetic ‘contact zone’.

Tracing a line of continuity between contemporary concerns for sensation and writers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, this project not only provides new knowledge on both canonical and lesser-known texts, it also offers routes to understanding contemporary discourses of environmental justice, illuminating how engagement with the natural world can complicate gendered, economic, and racialised power structures. With the increasing global threat to natural environments and the continued gulf between low-income and high-income nations, such a project makes an important contribution to addressing the urgent need to build understanding of the relationship between people and place.