Chapter 4 Place and planet: comparative literary research in an age of ‘global challenges’

Introducing the ‘place-based’ research agenda

This chapter sets out how languages and cultures research in general, and literary research in particular, contribute to understanding the relationship between the local and the planetary in the context of place-based research. Recent years have seen a pronounced shift towards a ‘place-based’ agenda for UK research. As early as 2019, Philip McCann identified this as part of a broader move towards place-based thinking across national and international policy circles, connecting the development of place-based policymaking to productivity agendas centred around maximising the efficiency of local economies.¹ This thinking clearly informs the British Academy’s 2021 report on place-based approaches to research funding in the social sciences, arts and humanities in the UK, which mentions ‘productivity’ seventeen times in sixteen pages, placing a strong emphasis on community knowledge exchange, the skills economy and the closing of the ‘regional productivity gap’.² Place was also identified as a strategic priority for UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) in 2021.³ Some of these developments are specific to the UK context, in which addressing the significant economic imbalances between regions, notably between London and elsewhere, has been a political ambition for successive governments not only in Westminster but also in the devolved nations and regions. Although comparable regional economic disparity clearly exists in other countries, including some of our closest European neighbours, the UK seems to have placed a unique emphasis on mobilising academic research and the higher education sector in order to bridge these productivity gaps.

It is possible to see the promotion of place-based research (via the strategic agenda set by UKRI and other funding bodies in dialogue with government) as a natural development of what has long been understood, in the British context, as the university’s obligation to be a good local citizen and to make a positive contribution to civic life. Stefan Collini, adopting a rather traditional view of the function of academic knowledge, critiques the attempt to ‘subordinate universities to the currently favoured form of economic policy’ rather than allow them to ‘concentrate on their principal task of extending and deepening human understanding’.⁴ Regardless of whether or not one subscribes to this understanding of what universities are ‘for’, it is worth noting that the successful implementation of a place-based approach to research at the level of higher education institutions (HEIs) is far from straightforward: a recent report examined the evidence for the efficacy of place-based research and development (R&D) investment against the backdrop of the previous government’s ‘levelling up’ agenda and found that there were risks as well as affordances in the encouragement of a place-based approach.⁵ An emphasis on place and civic engagement required significant capacity within HEIs, and ‘younger’ HEIs, as well as those serving marginalised and ‘left behind’ places, were more likely to regard themselves as having a responsibility towards civic engagement which resulted in them being ‘overburdened by local need’ – all while HEIs in ‘thriving’ areas were free to focus on research excellence and internationalisation for their own sake.⁶ These risks can be keenly felt in the context of arts and humanities research, where building in an emphasis on regional and place-based impact, let alone impact that results in increased local productivity or skills development, often feels at odds with the abstract ‘task of extending and deepening human understanding’ to which Collini asks researchers to aspire, and which many (though not all) active research academics in the humanities would recognise as their own.⁷

With all this in mind, what might intellectually meaningful and socially valuable placed-based research look like in the arts and humanities? The University of Glasgow’s Arts and Humanities Research Council-funded place-based research hub makes a passionate case for place as a lens to human experience:

Place is the foundation stone of individual and collective life, a geographic location and a repository of emotions, experiences, meanings, and memories. Places are where life courses are shaped, social networks are formed and the site of lived and felt experiences.⁸

This echoes Rebecca Madgin’s view, writing for UKRI, that:

Artworks, poems, novels, films, museums, and exhibitions each powerfully curate, tell and translate the stories of place. In addition, through research and creative practice the arts and humanities actively shape the everyday lived and felt experiences of people within places. […] Together, the arts and humanities bring to life why places matter to people and help us to understand the past, present, and future of places.⁹

Through the lens of the arts and humanities, place becomes the site of lived experience and a vital force in shaping and enabling communities to grow and identities to develop. The findings of one project connected to the Glasgow hub, Feeling Towns, report the impact of creative methods in helping residents of a range of places articulate their feelings (of pride or otherwise) about their local area. Far from being ‘subordinate […] to the currently favoured form of economic policy’, Feeling Towns explicitly aims to go ‘[b]eyond econometric approaches’ in accounting for forms of value, and values of place, not oriented towards local productivity agendas.¹⁰

While ‘Feeling Towns’ and the Glasgow hub bring together a variety of localities and communities across the UK to share findings, it is often assumed or implied that ‘place’ is local to the institution in question (and, indeed, that the institution is situated in space in such a way as to render the idea of ‘place’ meaningful). Other projects funded in response to a 2021 call focus exclusively on heritage, culture and place in the UK and almost all are specifically local to the HEI in question: a project at the University of Nottingham examines the city’s ‘hidden heritage’ in its cave network; Coventry University leads on ‘securing the place legacy’ of Coventry City of Culture 2021, and so on.¹¹ This feeds the assumption that place-based research is connected to responsible civic engagement on the part of the university.

In addition to the practical hazards of this approach, as set out by Kempton and others, there is an intellectual challenge here too. ‘Place’ means much more than ‘regions or cities in the UK with a university, outside of London’. If the objective of place-based research is to understand the ‘felt experiences of people within places’ in a holistic and meaningful way, rather than merely to support regional economic development in the UK or enable HEIs to act as responsible citizens in a particular local context, then the sense of what constitutes a place ought to be properly defined as the embodied corollary to the abstract ‘space’ in the broadest possible sense. It must encompass places without significant connections to local HEIs, including ‘centres’ as well as margins and peripheries; and above all, it must consider those ‘other’ places beyond national borders in which felt and lived experience is every bit as rich and meaningful, and significant to local and global economies, as it is in Britain.

Global challenges

One counterweight to UKRI’s place-based agenda that does, on paper, have the potential to enrich these local agendas is the emphasis on ‘global challenges’. The UK government’s Global Challenges Research Fund (GCRF) launched in 2016, funded by 0.7 per cent of the UK’s overseas development aid (ODA) budget to a total of £1.5 billion, had the stated objective of contributing to the UK’s aid strategy by ensuring ‘that the UK’s development spending will meet our moral obligation to the world’s poorest and also support our national interest’.¹² As with the place-based research agenda, the underlying objectives of the funding scheme were transparently economic, with a strong emphasis on development: ‘to generate innovative solutions to intractable development issues and to identify practicable pathways to healthier and safer lives, sustainable development and prosperity for all, equal and effective education, social justice and human rights, and stable institutions’.¹³ The six UKRI ‘strategic GCRF portfolios’ were global health, education, sustainable cities, food systems, conflict and resilience. The UN’s seventeen Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) provided the wider international context to these strategic priorities, as did a desire to build the capacity of, and partnerships with, researchers in ODA-eligible countries.

Although the future of this research agenda is somewhat uncertain in light of the sudden cut to GCRF funding from February 2022, and reductions to overall UK ODA budgets announced in 2025, the global challenge discourse nonetheless launched a cluster of research institutes, teaching initiatives and modes of policy engagement in UK higher education. As with the place-based agenda, there are both risks and affordances. The role played by the notion of the ‘global challenge’ in shaping research and policy is open to critique: Ludwig and others highlight the fact that ‘global challenges are most commonly highlighted together with the solutions offered by dominant actors’ – that is to say, global challenge thinking does not necessarily lead to better or even more innovative solutions, but tends to support the implementation of ideas already favoured by those with power.¹⁴ Similarly, Isakova and others, in an illuminating examination of the social construction of the global challenge discourse, find that research in this area commonly reinforces, rather than challenges, the dominant global order.¹⁵

Moreover, given the profound entanglement between global challenge thinking – particularly the way such thinking conceives of the nature of the global – and discourses of ‘sustainable development’, this framing is open to the same critiques that have been made of the UN SDGs and the wider ODA context. Namely, as Seema Arora-Jonsson puts it: that they conceal ‘a universalist agenda underpinned by Global North and neoliberal interests’ which is imposed upon, rather than shaped in dialogue with, the Global South; and that this universalist agenda, as has been noted elsewhere, takes for granted the notion of economic development as a general good, as well as assuming it to be compatible with environmental sustainability.¹⁶

Humanities thinking has the potential to expand and redefine the terms of the global-challenge debate. There are alternative ways of understanding the notion of the global and the framing of crisis, catastrophe or ‘challenge’ that draw on critical traditions including post-structuralism, eco-theory and post-colonialism. One example is Gayatri Spivak’s emphasis on the ‘planetary’ as the lived corollary of the abstract-economic ‘global’; another is Achille Mbembe’s analysis of planetary ‘necropolitics’ as an alternative conceptualisation of global power and violence.¹⁷ Such approaches insist on an attention to the marginalised people and epistemologies that can be rendered invisible by the ‘universalising’ framing of the global challenge.

These two trends, towards place-based research on the one hand and global-challenge thinking on the other, both require input from humanities disciplines in order to make their core assumptions visible and connect them meaningfully with social and cultural realities. Although both clearly have the potential to serve as powerful framings that allow researchers to engage with policy contexts at various scales, the current orthodoxy in which ‘place-based’ means ‘relating to a (more or less) deprived regional community in the UK’ and ‘global’ means ‘relating to the Global South without calling into question the power held by the Global North’ is not intellectually satisfactory.

Place and planet

Questions also arise as to how the place-based and global-challenge research agendas relate to each other. Global challenges have numerous and complex local causes and effects (think, for example, of the ‘think global, act local’ slogan of climate activism), and all lived experience of place is affected by global phenomena, world politics and economics. These relationships between the place-based or local and the global or planetary are far from straightforward: they are always mediated by intangible social and political formations such as nations, regions, provinces, continents and cultures.¹⁸ However, as yet, no research, policy or impact analysis has explored the ‘gap’ that springs up between these two trends in research funding and framing – which is all the more striking considering that many shared themes shape both agendas. Climate-change adaptation, mitigation and resilience; urban life, policy and planning; health and wellbeing; gender, racial and other forms of inequality are some of the common areas of focus. And yet little consideration is given, by policymakers and research-funding bodies at least, to how specific place-based interventions or understandings sit within a regional, national, continental or cultural context; and, in turn, how questions of cultures, epistemologies, power dynamics and identities at a global level inform and affect local contexts. Without a clear understanding of how the local and the planetary affect and modify one another via intermediate structures, the place-based research agenda risks parochialism, irrelevance and/or political naivety, and the global challenge agenda risks neocolonialism, instrumentalism and perpetuating inequality.

There are, of course, many rich bodies of theory on the local/global interface that might usefully inform an attempt to mediate between these competing scales – many of which come directly from humanities disciplines, within which the supra-local, sub-national framings, such as community, region, nation and culture, are central considerations. Two examples of thinkers in the post-colonial tradition have already been cited (Spivak and Mbembe) but other fields, including eco-theory and comparative literature, also have much to say about these dynamics. ‘Think global, act local’ has long been a central principle of environmental action. Ursula Heise explores how aesthetics have long been a key means by which the relationship of local to global is negotiated, arguing that literary and filming strategies, such as fragmentation, montage, collage and zooming, are some of the ways in which we imagine the connection between our felt, local places and the abstract, invisible reality of global systems.¹⁹ Heise writes of ‘eco-cosmopolitanism’ as a way of describing the responsibility we each have to ecosystems beyond our immediate place in a planetary context; Anna Tsing and others prefer the concept of ‘patchiness’ to describe the combination of local realities and global frameworks, thinking of systems not as composed of pre-existing structures, but rather conceptualising the systems, including world systems, as ‘thought experiments with which to make sense of structures’ at a local level.²⁰ At this local level, ‘patches’ are components of what they term ‘landscape structures’ (borrowing from the language of ecology) and provide space for thinking about differentiated human experience in ways that reject the problematic Anthropocentrism of some attempts to theorise social injustice in the era of humans as geological agents, the so-called Anthropocene.

New theories of world and comparative literature, too, scrutinise the idea of world systems and their relation to local experience. Emily Apter’s polemic against world literature contends that incommensurability and, ultimately, untranslatability, are overlooked realities undermining any vision of a universal Weltliteratur.²¹ There are strong echoes here of Arora-Jonsson’s critique of the ‘global challenge’ as a front for a post-Enlightenment universalist agenda grounded in ‘Western values’ – crucially, however, Apter’s work also offers something like a solution in thinking of language in all its differentiated reality as a useful impediment to the complete proliferation of an undesirably homogenous global culture. Language, Apter’s work implies, is valuable not because it allows us to communicate with one another across local boundaries, but because it highlights what Tsing might call the ‘patchiness’ of the world and its cultures.

Jennifer Wenzel tackles the problem of ‘world literature’ in the context of global environmental change, describing literature (alongside other cultural forms such as photography and film) as a form of what she terms ‘world-imagining’; the literary, for Wenzel, is part of a ‘mesh of relations in which the liberatory and immiserating implications of globalisations – old and new – are knit and can be laid bare’.²² By offering close readings of texts which navigate a variety of routes through this mesh, navigating different spatial scales, her world demonstrates how literature and culture allow writers – and, more importantly, readers – to overcome the ‘quarantines of imagination’ that might restrict thinking to homogenous linguistic, cultural, geographical or social bubbles, while also allowing for an uneven (or ‘patchy’) conceptualisation of the global. As for Heise, literary form is central to Wenzel’s thinking, since it is form that situates both writers and readers within this dynamic of uneven globalisation and that (via strategies of reflexivity in particular) makes this position visible to them during the process of world-imagining she describes.

Case study: Wetland Times

According to these recent theories of comparative and world literature, then, language, and especially the literary use of language, is a key means by which the imaginative projections that connect the local to the planetary are generated, mediated and problematised. Literary research thus has a central role to play in ensuring that place-based research addresses and informs global challenges, and that the sense of the global implied by the global challenge discourse remains attentive to social and cultural differences and power dynamics.

My own ongoing research project explores the role of the literary and linguistic imagination in navigating the spatialised temporality of a particular sort of landscape, the wetland. The project, funded by a British Academy International Interdisciplinary Knowledge Frontiers grant since 2023, is concerned with the ‘temporal ecosystems’ of three global wetland sites (Morecambe Bay, UK; the northern European Wadden Sea; and Dja Faunal Reserve in southern Cameroon). Its central aim is to investigate the different ways in which time is conceptualised, experienced and described in these vulnerable and complex landscapes, using an interdisciplinary approach combining methodologies from both arts and humanities and social science.

Wetland Times is a project about both place and time. These three very different places are brought into dialogue by examining a shared global issue, that of time and how it is conceptualised in the context of environmental change. Time is central to conversations about climate change and conservation practice, which is constantly reflecting on temporal phenomena: how to model future scenarios, how to ensure sustainable land use and management, and how to protect or preserve past and existing landscapes and habitats. One central question conservationists face, for example, hinges on the problem of ‘baselines’: given that unmanaged landscapes are constantly in flux, how do conservation practitioners charged with restoring or maintaining a place decide which is the ‘correct’ version of the landscape to preserve or reconstruct?²³ (This happens to be particularly challenging when it comes to wetlands, which are some of the most unstable of landscapes and highly variable: Annie Proulx likens global wetlands to ‘wallpaper samples, each with its own design and character’.)²⁴

The project is interested in both local and global times. In terms of global (and globalising) time, we focus partly on the idea of the Anthropocene, which unsettles human narratives of progress, development and freedom at a planetary level. But we are implicitly critical of this move towards a totalising planetary time, since the accompanying prescription for ‘deep time’ and planetary thinking to solve ecological problems often threatens to dominate and overwrite the messy, locally specific and culturally sensitive times that underpin the human relationship with nature which Wetland Times seeks to recuperate and foreground.

How does the project conceive of the relationship between the local and the global, between the ‘place-based’ studies of Morecambe Bay, the Wadden Sea and the Dja Faunal Reserve on the one hand, and the ‘global challenge’ of environmental change, wildlife conservation and habitat preservation on the other? The primary way in which we understand this connection is via language and, more specifically, via concepts or Begriffe, contested words and phrases that have accumulated and reflect complex webs of social and cultural meaning.²⁵ ‘Anthropocene’, ‘conservation’ or ‘development’ are three English-language examples that play an important role in academic and technical discourse about global challenges; we situate these in dialogue with concepts that occur in specific local contexts, including in languages other than English. We adopt a variety of strategies for exploring which concepts are locally meaningful to communities in Morecambe, the Wadden and the Dja. These include fieldwork interviews and participatory arts methodologies, but also – and most importantly for the purposes of this chapter – we look at literary texts, which are a rich source of data for understanding how time concepts are developed, understood and contested within particular local languages and contexts.

One useful example of this in the German-language context is the poet Ulrike Draesner’s long poem Doggerland (2021).²⁶ This experimental, book-length text describes the development and collapse of a Mesolithic hunter–gatherer (and later settled agricultural) civilisation occupying the territory that today lies submerged between the east coast of Britain and the northern coast of the European landmass (spanning Germany, Denmark and the Netherlands). Doggerland is, therefore, bordered by the English fens on the one hand and the Wadden Sea coast on the other, and is often described as a kind of invisible, primordial wetland landscape, deep time in an imagined place. ‘Before the Fens there was Doggerland’, as Proulx puts it.²⁷

Draesner’s poem is a complex, multi-layered and multilingual text that comprises three columns: a column of modern English words to the left, a column of modern German words to the right and in the centre, the ‘main’ text that switches freely between these and other languages, including proto-Indo-European. The text, showing as it does the emerging glossaries of contemporary English and German, which encompasses words like Vergangenheit [past], Erzählung [narrative] or Geschichte [story or history], dramatises the coming into being and contestation of time concepts. At the same time, it also presents time and temporal concepts for the reader’s consideration; not least the idea of history itself, including and in relation to pre-history. The poem asks at what point in human evolution a sense of historicity emerges and how, and seems to posit a connection between this and the development of agriculture, as the shift to settlement is also accompanied by a formal shift in the poem to more regular line lengths and rhythms. Other time concepts are also scrutinised and given specific meaning in relation to Doggerland and, by extension, the modern Wadden Sea coast: the concept of the archive, for example, as a storehouse of historical data that lays itself open to (re)interpretation. The Wadden, or the North Sea, seabed is revealed by Draesner’s text to be a rich cultural and linguistic archive. ‘Deep time’, a phrase that occurs often in the text, is also given particular meaning here in ways that connect with and enrich the global discourse around geological temporality: Draesner’s deep time is not only the time of inert rocks and geological processes, but also of early humans and the non-human creatures with which they lived in close proximity.

In all of these cases, a specific artistic engagement with place yields new insights that can usefully be put into dialogue with insights from other cultures, other places, to gain a deeper understanding of a global phenomenon, that of time in landscapes affected by environmental change. Moreover, the language arts have a specific role to play precisely because they, more than any other realm of human activity, are capable of staging the complexity of concepts and animating linguistic concepts with rich and subtle meanings. Language reflects, but also shapes, the ‘patchiness’ of which Tsing and others write: it is a phenomenon that connects, but that also allows for difference and separation to be acknowledged.

Conclusion

The study of literature, including literary research, has long been felt to achieve what Collini argues ought to be the central task of universities, the ‘deepening [of] human understanding’. Until relatively recently, literary scholars were rarely called upon to explain precisely how it does so, let alone in terms that appeal to research funding bodies and prospective students alike. The place-based research agenda has the potential to underpin both moral and practical arguments for the value of a certain kind of literary study interested in places local to any given HEI, that can then be leveraged in the service of an argument about greater cultural understanding leading to improved economic productivity or social cohesion. But this place-based approach alone is not sufficient to explain the value of literary research that goes beyond certain regional literary traditions in the UK: which is global or comparative in scope, which is interested in languages, literatures and cultures other than English and, perhaps in the ‘other’ more broadly, that which lies outside the realm of our immediate local experience. Where once this openness to global cultures might have been understood as an end in itself, now those who wish to study them are frequently asked: why here? Why not leave the study of literature in any language to the nation or community of ‘native’ speakers? The agenda of the ‘global challenge’ – or, indeed, the market logic of internationalisation – is not seen as enough justification for an in-depth understanding of the languages, literatures and cultures of other places. On the contrary, as discussed above, this way of understanding social and environmental problems is frequently accompanied by a resurgent universalism, an assumption that the ‘challenges’ of one culture or community are the same as the challenges of another.

In response to this challenge, literary researchers must argue strongly that our research, especially that which looks across linguistic and cultural boundaries, can add much-needed nuance to our sense of both the local and the global. Drawing on my own current research, I have given one example of how it does this, by revealing and reshaping the concepts via which we communicate within and beyond our local contexts. There are many other literary methodologies that provide a similarly productive means of revealing how literature, language and culture supply a vital perspective on the relationship between the local and the global. And it is, arguably, in these many layers – not only literature but also history, culture, politics, society and community – between place on the one hand and planet on the other where the most is at stake.

Notes

1.   Philip McCann, UK Research and Innovation: A Place-Based Shift?, July 2019, McCann_-_UK_Research_and_Innovation_-_A_Place-Based_Shift_vFinal.pdf [accessed 17 June 2026].

2.   The British Academy, Place-Based Approaches to Research Funding (The British Academy, 22 March 2021), doi:10.5871/place/9780856726576.001.

3.   ‘Place Matters: The Arts and Humanities and the Place Agenda’, 2021, https://www.ukri.org/blog/place-matters-the-arts-and-humanities-and-the-place-agenda/ [accessed 25 September 2024].

4.   Stefan Collini, Speaking of Universities (Verso, 2017), p. 127.

5.   ‘Universities, Economic Development and “Levelling Up” – How Can Universities Make a Positive Impact on Their Local Areas?’, Impact of Social Sciences, 2021, https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2021/11/16/universities-economic-development-and-levelling-up-how-can-universities-make-a-positive-impact-on-their-local-areas/ [accessed 25 September 2024]. See also Louise Kempton and others, Putting Universities in Their Place: An Evidence-Based Approach to Understanding the Contribution of Higher Education to Local and Regional Development (Routledge, 2021), doi:10.4324/9781003198154.

6.   ‘Universities, Economic Development and “Levelling Up” – How Can Universities Make a Positive Impact on Their Local Areas?’

7.   Collini, Speaking of Universities, p. 126.

8.   ‘University of Glasgow Place-Based Research Programme Hub: About the Programme’, https://www.gla.ac.uk/schools/socialpolitical/research/urbanstudies/activities/projects/place-basedresearchprogramme/abouttheprogramme/ [accessed 28 September 2024].

9.   ‘Place Matters’.

10.   Nicky Marsh, Michael Howcroft, and Joseph Owen, ‘Pride in Place’ Beyond the Metrics: Insights from the Feeling Towns Project (University of Glasgow, 14 March 2024), doi:10.36399/gla.pubs.321921.

11.   ‘Funding boost and expertise to level up places around the UK’, 2022, https://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/ukgwa/20250107101250/https://www.ukri.org/news/funding-boost-and-expertise-to-level-up-places-around-the-uk/ [accessed 3 June 2026].

12.   Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, UK Strategy for the Global Challenges Research Fund (GCRF), 2017.

13.   Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy. It is worth noting that projects actually funded by the GCRF interpreted these objectives in a range of ways, and some were implicitly or explicitly critical of the ‘global challenge’ discourse in ways that align with my argument.

14.   David Ludwig and others, ‘What’s Wrong with Global Challenges?’, Journal of Responsible Innovation, 9.1 (2022), pp. 6–27, doi:10.1080/23299460.2021.2000130.

15.   Constructing Global Challenges in World Politics, ed. by Alina Isakova and others (Routledge, 2024), doi:10.4324/9781003452348.

16.   Seema Arora-Jonsson, ‘The Sustainable Development Goals: A Universalist Promise for the Future’, Futures, 146 (2023), p. 103087, doi:10.1016/j.futures.2022.103087.

17.   Gayatri Spivak, ‘ “Planetarity” (Box 4, WELT)’, Paragraph, 38.2 (2015), pp. 290–2; Achille Mbembe, Necropolitics, Theory in Forms series (Duke University Press, 2019).

18.   For one example of a call for ‘interconnectedness’ in place-based research from beyond the arts and humanities, see Patricia Balvanera and others, ‘Interconnected Place-Based Social–Ecological Research Can Inform Global Sustainability’, Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability, 29 (2017), pp. 1–7, doi:10.1016/j.cosust.2017.09.005.

19.   Ursula K. Heise, Sense of Place and Sense of Planet: The Environmental Imagination of the Global (Oxford University Press, 2008).

20.   Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, Andrew S. Mathews, and Nils Bubandt, ‘Patchy Anthropocene: Landscape Structure, Multispecies History, and the Retooling of Anthropology: An Introduction to Supplement 20’, Current Anthropology, 60.S20 (2019), pp. S186–97, doi:10.1086/703391.

21.   Emily S. Apter, Against World Literature: On the Politics of Untranslatability (Verso, 2013). For other, related, critiques of the resurgence of interest in ‘world literature’ since 2000, see Pheng Cheah, ‘What is a World? On World Literature as World-Making Activity’, Daedalus, 137.3 (2008), pp. 26–38, doi:10.1162/daed.2008.137.3.26; Sharae Deckard, Combined and Uneven Development: Towards a New Theory of World-Literature, Postcolonialism across the Disciplines, Volume 17 (Liverpool University Press, 2015).

22.   Jennifer Wenzel, The Disposition of Nature: Environmental Crisis and World Literature (Fordham University Press, 2019), p. 8.

23.   See Jamie Lorimer and others, ‘Rewilding: Science, Practice, and Politics’, Annual Review of Environment and Resources, 40.1 (2015), pp. 39–62, doi:10.1146/annurev-environ-102014-021406.

24.   Annie Proulx, Fen, Bog and Swamp: A Short History of Peatland Destruction and its Role in the Climate Crisis (Simon and Schuster, 2023), p. 18.

25.   Our theoretical framework here draws on the work of Reinhart Koselleck. See Reinhart Koselleck, ‘Introduction and Prefaces to the Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe’, Contributions to the History of Concepts, 6.1 (2011), pp. 1–37, doi:10.3167/choc.2011.060102.

26.   Ulrike Draesner, Doggerland: Gedicht (Penguin, 2021).

27.   Proulx, Fen, Bog and Swamp, p. 44.

References