This dissertation examines depictions of littoral spaces – beaches, islands and coastal areas – in contemporary British and Scandinavian nature writing, with a particular focus on depictions and negotiations of (deep) time and temporalities in the age of the Anthropocene. By analysing nature writing texts set in coastal areas of the United Kingdom, Denmark and Norway, a regional focus that covers large parts of the North Sea, as well as parts the Norwegian Sea and the North Atlantic Ocean is carved out. This regionality allows for an exploration of how depictions and understandings of time emerge through histories and knowledges that are tied to local place, as well as through global perspectives that indicate an “Anthropocenic awareness” (Voie 2017).
Considering the various ways the Anthropocene disrupts temporal understandings, this project looks at how nature writing situates questions of time in littoral spaces – both through an engagement with the material and agential qualities of the beach, as well as by evoking local folklores and myths. It examines how these engagements and evocations are aesthetically and affectively conveyed, and asks how these understandings of time can speak to the problems of “scalar derangement” (Clark 2015) that the Anthropocene poses.