Eco-memoir
| Authors | |
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| Year of publication | 2025 |
| Type | Chapter of a book |
| MU Faculty or unit | |
| Citation | |
| Description | The chapter provides a theoretical survey of eco-memoir, defined as “the literary expression of the interlacing of memory and the natural environment” (Jessica White 2018, 142), and “the writing of self into place and place into self” (Tom Lynch 2016). Overlapping with eco-biography—which interweaves the stories of the self and the region (Whitlock 2016, 571; White 2020, 18), and landscape memoir—a “reflexive attempt to explore the different places that the self inhabits” (Huddard and Huggan 2022: 205), eco-memoir foregrounds an eco-poetics of insecurity and tension between the self and the environment, an ideal venue for literary experimentation. In the analytical part, The Blue Plateau: An Australian Pastoral by Mark Tredinnick (2009) will be examined as an example of contemporary eco-memoir which combines nature writing and life writing by narrating stories of places interwoven with the lives of ‘small people’. Tredinnick’s eco-memoir is experimental through a series of peculiar paratexts as well as its hybridized style of narrating micro-histories, staged and stylized, of long forgotten families, while inscribing the author’s self in the larger history of Australian settlement. I will argue that this form of eco-memoir resonates particularly in Australian life writing and has become a way of emplacing white settlers vis-a-vis Indigenous dispossession. |
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