On this module you will learn about how literature and film represent and interrogate different ideas about ‘nature’. You will take an interdisciplinary approach to understanding how thinking about the natural world has evolved since the nineteenth century, and how modern sciences have helped to shape stories that are told about nature. You will consider some of the urgent environmental debates of the twentieth century, and critically investigate the range of ways in which literature and film engage with them.You will explore a range of texts from the late nineteenth-century up to the present day. Through Victorian texts such as Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles you will investigate how nineteenth-century science suggested new ways of understanding the natural world and the impact that had on men’s and women’s sense of identity. Non-fiction narratives about nature such as those offered in the essays of Kathleen Jamie and in wildlife films and documentaries will be discussed. In the second half of the module, global challenges of environmental degradation, petroculture, climate change, and social and economic justice will be probed through ecocritical lenses, through environmental films such as Michael Madsen’s Into Eternity and through prose narratives which may include essays by Kathleen Jamie, Helon Habila’s Oil on Water, and Ruth Ozeki’s A Tale for the Time Being, for example. You will critically examine such texts for their narrative representation and critiques of these themes and issues, and for the ways of thinking they might offer about how people relate to the natural world and engage with environmentalism and sustainability.