Kathleen Jamie’s Nature Writing
The paper proceeds from explorations of Jamie’s prosaic works, Findings (2005) and Sightlines (2012), within the context of an earlier generation of Scottish Renaissance writing about nature, specifically Nan Shepherd’s iconic work The Living Mountain (1977), to assess her latest essayistic collection, Surfacing (2019). It explores Jamie’s consistent interest in what it means to write about nature; her fidelity to an ethics of listening; and her explorations of identity, gender, and nationhood. While Riach and Crawford see Jamie’s evolving use of Scots as a sign of an increasingly assured engagement with nationhood, this paper discusses Jamie’s explorations of the natural world to which she looks for her markers and guides to examine what reconnects us to our past, personal as well as national.
Michaela Marková, Technical University of Liberec