Commons in Contemporary British Nature Writing: Literary Form into Praxis

New Formations - Print ISSN 0950-2378 - Online ISSN 1741-0789
Volume 2025 Number 115

Commons in Contemporary British Nature Writing: Literary Form into Praxis
Jos Smith pages 110‑127
DOI: 10.3898/NEWF:115.06.2025

Abstract

How do contemporary British nature writers think with, write with, and represent commons as landscapes? Sites of violent dispossession and vestigial survival, sites of haunting and historical traces, and sites of contemporary and future possibility, British commons represent a distinctive set of affordances for authors today. This article explores how two authors – Nick Hayes and Helen Baczkowska – have engaged with these landscapes and what their writing can tell us about the status and meanings of commons today. It draws on the idea of the ‘double character’ of commons aesthetics1, investigating the commons both in the context of the literary aesthetics of nature writing and in the context of the activism of these authors, a kind of social cultural work that exceeds and expands such aesthetics. The article draws out an argument about the conflicted presence of British commons that these authors help to make visible, a presence caught in a tension between historic losses and speculative possibilities. 

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To cite this article
Jos Smith (2025) Commons in Contemporary British Nature Writing: Literary Form into Praxis, New Formations, 2025(115), 110-127 . https://doi.org/10.3898/NEWF:115.06.2025

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