Sethi, Anita (2024) Walking through a Wounderland Wilderness, Wellbeing and Where to Belong in I Belong Here a Journey Along the Backbone of Britain and Other Works. Doctoral thesis, York St John University.

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Abstract

This PhD comprises a critical review and original creative writing consisting primarily of my book I Belong Here: a Journey Along the Backbone of Britain (2021) and interrelated essays and stories, all themed around place and exploring the central theme of the thesis. I Belong Here found a home on bookshop shelves in the categories Nature, Travel and Memoir & Biography, straddling these interdisciplinary genres within ‘place writing’ and entailing extensive research including topics such as reclaiming and restoring landscape and language, place and postcolonialism, and walking, wildlife, woundedness and wellbeing. The critical component contexualises my work and shows its influences and impact, elucidating how it has made a significant, independent and original contribution to knowledge.
I trace the literary history of writers finding succour in nature back to Romantic poets and whilst sharing some commonalities with the English pastoral tradition of finding wonder and awe in nature, I problematise, challenge, and add a new dimension, forging a new literary pathway. Wainwright’s account of finding solace walking in nature in A Pennine Journey (1986) inspired but also repelled me in its misogynistic language. The genre has long been dominated by the “lone enraptured male” (Jamie, 2008) and although nature writing has grown in popularity with bestselling books by female authors, it is still characterised by problematic homogeneity. I apply the intersectional thinking developed by Kimberlé Crenshaw and bell hooks to nature writing, contributing knowledge about the interrelatedness of place, race, gender, class and regionality.
Crucially, I show the effects of systemic inequality on mental health and on access to nature. The etymology of trauma is ‘wound’ and in my original writing I walk through the ‘wounderland’ of the scarred landscape of the North, along the way exploring psychological wounds and causal structural injustice. I draw on but develop in new directions literary trauma theorists such as Caruth (1996) to show the interrelation of place, the political and personhood, and the effects of intergenerational and postcolonial trauma. I explore how language and landscape can help us bear the seemingly unbearable – transforming wounds into words, in turn enabling a writing back to toxic colonialist narratives, ‘bearing witness’ to a post-pastoral, postcolonial experience. I Belong Here traces a journey in which walking through the wild does wonders for the wellbeing but as I grapple with notions of ‘nature cure’, I show why – at this time of ecological crisis - we must care better for nature and put forward the phrase ‘nature care’.
At the heart of my work is where and how we lose and gain a sense of belonging - I posit the book in itself as a place, showing how books can help us belong. I demonstrate how – through its original contribution to literature - my book has engendered new forms of belonging.

Item Type:	Thesis (Doctoral)
Status:	Published
Subjects:	P Language and Literature > PN Literature (General)
School/Department:	School of Humanities
URI:	https://ray.yorksj.ac.uk/id/eprint/11089

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