Samantha Walton

In Search of the Nature Cure

Everybody Needs Beauty

Guilty But Insane offers a timely and challenging discussion of the relationship between popular literature, science, and what it means to be human by examining how writers of detective fiction during the 1920s to 1940s understood guilt, responsibility, and the workings of the mind in relation to crime.

Mind and Law in Golden Age Detective Fiction

Guilty But Insane

Harnessing new enthusiasm for Nan Shepherd's writing, The Living World asks how literature might help us reimagine humanity's place on earth in the midst of our ecological crisis. The first book to examine Shepherd's writing through an ecocritical lens, it reveals forgotten details about the scientific, political and philosophical climate of early twentieth century Scotland, and offers new insights into Shepherd's distinctive environmental thought. More than this, this book reveals how Shepherd's ways of relating to complex, interconnected ecologies predate many of the core themes and concerns of the multi-disciplinary environmental humanities, and may inform their future development. Broken down into chapters focusing on themes of place, ecology, environmentalism, Deep Time, vital matter and selfhood, The Living World offers the first integrated study of Shepherd's writing and legacy, making the work of this philosopher, feminist, amateur ecologist, geologist, and innovative modernist, accessible and relevant to a new community of readers.

Nan Shepherd and Environmental Thought

The Living World

'Beautifully written, intimate and intellectually fascinating' Nathan Filer 'Impeccably researched . . . A call to us all to find a place within the simplicity and complexity of nature' Lara Maiklem, bestselling author of Mudlarking 'Essential reading for our trammelled, troubled times' David Farrier Everybody is talking about the healing properties of nature. Hospitals are being retrofitted with gardens, and forests reimagined as wellbeing centres. On the Shetland Islands, it is possible to walk into a doctor's surgery with anxiety or depression, and walk out with a prescription for nature. Where has this come from, and what does 'going to nature' mean? Where is it – at the end of a garden, beyond the tarmac fringes of a city, at the summit of a mountain? Drawing on history, science, literature and art, Samantha Walton shows that the nature cure has deep roots – but, as we face an unprecedented crisis of mental health, social injustice and environmental devastation, the search for it is more urgent now than ever. Everybody Needs Beauty engages seriously with the connection between nature and health, while scrutinising the harmful trends of a wellness industry that seeks to exploit our relationship with the natural world. In doing so, this book explores how the nature cure might lead us towards a more just and radical way of life: a real means of recovery, for people, society and nature.

At a moment when contemporary culture is again coming to terms with new and challenging theories about the relationship between the mind, identity, and selfhood, this book will offer a timely and challenging discussion of the relationship between popular literature, science, and what it means to be human. It will be of interest to an academic and non-academic readership concerned with the history of detective fiction, to researchers of the representation of mentalillness and also law in literature, and to scholars and students of twentieth century literature more generally. The book's engaging prose style, skilful organisation and lucid presentation ofevidence and close readings will make it accessible to both students and non-specialist readers, at the same time as it will prove fresh and rewarding for specialists.

Guilty But Insane takes an historical approach to golden age detective fiction by Margery Allingham, Christianna Brand, Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, and Gladys Mitchell. It examines how writers and readers of detective fiction during the 1920s to 1940s understood guilt, responsibility, and the workings of the mind as they related to the commission, the investigation, and the punishment of crime. Under the lens of psychology, the detective novel is revealed as a site for the negotiation of competing interpretations of sanity and insanity. An unexplored depth and subtlety is revealed in detective novels that address major controversies in legal and psychiatric theory and practice, while significant resonances with specific concerns of modernist fiction come into focus for the first time. During the interwar years, proponents of competing psychological schools challenged legal concepts of responsibility and free will. In response, golden age writers began to reflect on the genre's promise to accomplish true and just solutions in a social order in which the relationship between law and justice was being problematized on several fronts. By making connections between high modernism and popular culture, and by tracing the impact of psychological discourses across a range of different cultural outputs, this book makes a persuasive case for reading detective fiction historically. It aims to demonstrate the richness of these texts and their value for scholarship, not only as historical documents or residues of discourse, but as literary texts which challenge, subvert, toy with and test the prevailing values and prejudices of interwar Britain.

Harnessing new enthusiasm for Nan Shepherd's writing, this book asks how literature might help us to reimagine humanity's place on earth in the midst of our ecological crisis. The first book to examine Shepherd's prose and fiction through an ecocritical lens, The Living World reveals forgotten details about the scientific, political and philosophical climate of early twentieth century Scotland, and offers new understandings of Shepherd's distinctive environmental thought. With a focus on The Living Mountain, but touching upon The Weatherhouse, A Pass in the Grampians, poetry from In the Cairngorms, and Shepherd's personal archive, Samantha Walton explores how Shepherd's innovative and prescient nature writing can be better understood in light of new and multi-disciplinary environmental humanities approaches. More than this, this book proposes that Shepherd's ways of relating to complex, interconnected ecologies predate many of the core themes and concerns of current science, environmental cultural studies, and philosophy, and may inform their future development. Broken down into chapters focuses on themes of place, planet, ecology, environmentalism, Deep Time, vital matter and selfhood, The Living World offers the first integrated study of Shepherd's writing and legacy, making the work of this philosopher, feminist, amateur ecologist, geologist, and innovative modernist, accessible and relevant to a new community of readers.

Samantha Walton

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