Troubling Times: Navigating Ecological Crisis in Old English and Twenty-First-Century Eco-Literature

Abstract

Old English ecocriticism has experienced a surge in interest in recent years, but it has been slow in its adoption of theory; ecocritical studies of early medieval literature remain predominantly historicist, regarding the Middle Ages as ecocritically significant insofar as this was the period when the seeds of our current crisis were sown. The central theoretical intervention of this thesis is to challenge such teleological ecocritical narratives, conceptualising the tenth and twenty-first centuries not as points at opposite ends of a historical timeline but as moments connected by common ecological, existential, and epistemological crises. Moving away from the relatively static ecocritical concept of rootedness in place, this thesis explores how people, texts, and ecological networks move through and are reshaped by time, focusing specifically on periods of crisis and instability. By considering how a selection of the Old English metrical charms conceptualise and respond to ruptures in the ecological fabric, Chapter One advances a framework for understanding ecological crisis as a transtemporal phenomenon. Turning to the all-encompassing crisis that was the impending end of time, Chapter Two argues that the Rogationtide homilies of AElfric of Eynsham develop an eschatological epistemology that, in being attuned to the realities of human perception and understanding, functions as an alternative to apocalypticism. Chapter Three focuses on Old English boundary clauses, a group of texts traditionally excluded both from Old English ecocriticism and from literary studies more generally. Exploring these textual landscapes via the figure of the mearcstapa or border walker, I trace how human relationships with their local, lived environments are remade and unmade in language and through time. The final chapter turns to Paul Kingsnorth's Buckmaster Trilogy, a work of contemporary medievalist fiction; by foregrounding the anachrony of these novels, I explore how the eco and the medieval intersect to generate a contested eco-ideological landscape. Although the texts considered in each of these chapters represent and respond to ecological instability on differing scales, they all speak to the idea that such instability arises at the intersection of multiple, often conflicting temporalities: human and nonhuman, divine and secular, linear and cyclical. By disclosing the multiplicity of time, these works of eco-literature destabilise the teleological and apocalyptic epistemologies that underpin much contemporary environmental discourse, and allow us to resituate (medieval and ongoing) crises within a more expansive notion of ecological time.

Date of Award	1 Aug 2023
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	The University of Manchester
Supervisor	Anke Bernau (Supervisor) & James Paz (Supervisor)