Rewilding, Wilding, and the New Georgic in Contemporary Nature Writing

Abstract

ABSTRACT This essay explores the representation of the concepts of rewilding, wilding and regenerative farming in contemporary nature writing, focusing on George Monbiot’s Feral: Rewilding the Land, Sea and Human Life (2013), Isabella Tree’s Wilding: The Return of Nature to a British Farm (2018), and James Rebanks’ English Pastoral (2020). It contextualises farming in the broad social, economic and biopolitical arena of the 20th century, and in literary terms reflects on the rupture in the georgic tradition post-World War 2, in order to understand the current tension between conservation and agriculture. The essay also investigates the deployment of the literary tropes of the wild, the pastoral and the georgic in these texts, and concludes by proposing the emergence of a ‘new georgic’ in which the farmer does not simply wrestle with nature in order to produce food but is engaged in producing nature itself.