Nature and Narrative: Rhetoric and Design in Contemporary Fiction

The book explores environmental issues in twenty-first-century Anglophone fiction and how those issues are dealt with by specific literary means. It proposes a reciprocal relationship between nature and narrative―the idea according to which nature both informs and inspires artistic creations, while literary designs and rhetoric also shape our ideas and perceptions of the natural environment. It is argued that in order to address design and rhetoric in environmental texts, we need a close analysis of those world-shaping functions of literary narratives that unite ecocritical and narratological interests. The author presents readings of contemporary novels and their varying ways of seeing nature through narrative devices and fictional minds. The novels discussed in the book are Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall, Toni Morrison’s A Mercy, Ian McGuire’s The North Water, Barbara Kingsolver’s The Lacuna, Paul Harding’s Tinkers and Enon, J. M. Coetzee’s Elizabeth Costello, Ian McEwan’s Solar, and Jenny Offill’s Weather.

Markku Lehtimäki, PhD., is a professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Turku, Finland. His fields of expertise are narrative theory, visual culture, ecocriticism, American literature, and the contemporary novel. His research projects include Natural Narratology, Cognitive Poetics, and Ecocriticism (2009–2011), The Changing Environment of the North: Cultural Representations and Uses of Water (2017–2021), The Novel’s Knowledge: The Changing Roles of Author and Book in Society (2022–2024), and Authors of the Story Economy: Narrative and Digital Capital in the 21st Century Literary Field (2024–2028). He is the author or co-editor of several books, most recently Visual Representations of the Arctic: Imagining Shimmering Worlds in Culture, Literature and Politics (Routledge 2021) and Cold Waters: Tangible and Symbolic Seascapes of the North (2022). He has also published articles in journals such as Image [&] Narrative, Storyworlds: A Journal of Narrative Theory, and Style.