Word and World: Bodily Perception in the Narrative Non-fiction of Kathleen Jamie and Nan Shepherd

Abstract

In a tradition of nature and mountain writing in which the solitary male intellectual has long dominated, Kathleen Jamie and Nan Shepherd stood out as offering a new way of writing about the natural world. Inherent in their writing is a repositioning of humanity that neither separates the human from the living world, nor determines anything that is perceived there. Instead, both Jamie and Shepherd focus on their sensed experience of the world, on their bodily perception, as a means by which to interpret that world and to express their part of it. I will draw primarily on the non-fiction prose of both writers to establish this privileging of the senses of the body, and to consider then the relationship that language has with the body and the role that it can play in what Shepherd calls the ‘interpenetration’ of place and mind. 1 I will then consider how Jamie's and Shepherd's perspective shapes the writing of their texts, the journey from sensed experience of the living landscape, through its transformation into language, to the text formed by the writer, and the subsequent implications for the way in which nature writing connects with the living world from which it came.