Introduction

In recent decades, independent mobility and children’s outdoor leisure time have been significantly reduced in Switzerland, as in most Western countries (Carver et al. 2013; Rivière 2016; Skår and Krogh 2009). However, the results published by Grize et al. (2010) in the trend study on active transportation to school in Switzerland between 1994 and 2005 showed that Swiss children still prefer to use soft or sustainable mobility (walking, cycling or scooter) to go to school. They travel alone or with friends using various means; 65% of children walk and 10% cycle. One in ten children is driven to school by their parents (Pedestrian Mobility Switzerland 2016). However, there has been a slight increase in the number of parents driving their children to and/or from school (or at least once a day). Around 70% of schoolchildren live less than 1.6 km from school (Corso Talento 2010) and this has changed very little over the years, mainly due to the district education system widely adopted in Switzerland, which encourages pupils to attend the school closest to their home. The system favours short journeys and promotes ‘a major integration of schools into the social fabric of neighbourhoods’ (Poretti 2016, 11). However, analysis of the data from various Swiss cantons reveals substantial differences; children in the German-speaking areas are the most significant users (80%) of soft mobility to go to school. This figure falls to 56% in French-speaking regions and to just 25% in the Italian-speaking canton of Ticino (Grize et al. 2010).

Most studies conducted on the journey to school, especially in Switzerland, focus on road safety and health and are generally carried out by researchers for public bodies (see Association Transports et Environnement 2010; Interkantonale Lehrmittelzentrale 2011; Haberer 2010; Kehne 2011). They show that the main risk factors in road safety, from the parents’ point of view, range from the length of the journey to the mode of transport (McDonald 2008), or the number of road crossings to obstacles and problems such as the presence or absence of a pavement or cycle path, or the position of bus stops. However, less is known about how children – the principal users, rather than adults who are merely ‘non-active’ passers-by – commute between home and school.

Introduction

Children’s independent travel to and from school has sharply declined in the past decades while a growing number of children are taken to and from school by car. This trend is well documented by long-term repeated data collection in various countries (Shaw et al. (2013) for England and Germany; Schoeppe et al. (2016) for Australia; Mitra et al. (2016) for Canada; Kyttä et al. (2015) for Finland; McDonald (2012) for the United States) and by comparisons of child travel and outdoor activities with retrospective accounts of the childhoods of previous generations (parents or grandparents) (Clements 2004; Pooley et al. 2005; Woolley and Griffin 2015).

Both the increase in driving at the cost of non-motorised travel or public transport and the trend towards escorted trips at the expense of independent mobility are alarming for various reasons, including negative effects on child development, health, the environment and traffic safety (see Scheiner (2016) for a more nuanced discussion and more references). From the children’s subjective perspective, independence generally seems to be valued more positively than not (Mitchell et al. 2007; Crawford et al. 2017).

There are many potential reasons for these trends, including parents’ fears, concerns, perceptions and attitudes towards their children travelling without adult company. Their concerns include stranger danger, other children or adolescents bullying their child, lack of traffic safety and more. The importance of parents’ perceptions for their children’s travel and territorial range has been documented in numerous studies (Wilson et al. 2018; Vlaar et al. 2019; Scheiner et al. 2019a, b). Parental fear has even been recognised as the most significant factor in children’s access to outdoor play (Valentine and McKendrick 1997). At the same time, there seems to be some tension in parental attitudes. Little (2015) reports on semi-structured interviews with mothers of four- to five-year-old children in Sydney that showed how these mothers clearly acknowledge the benefits of (even risky) outdoor playing and express a desire to provide opportunities for their children to engage in such play, but at the same time struggle with their own fears about their children’s safety (similarly, O’Connor and Brown 2013). Suffice it to say that parental practices also vary widely among individuals, including, for instance, ‘helicopter parents’ and ‘engaged and enabling parents’ ( Joelsson 2019, see also Visser et al. 2015).

Introduction

While scholars in Canada and around the world have given more attention to children’s school journeys over the past 30 years, the school travel experiences of disabled children and their families have remained mostly ignored. The inattention to disability within the school travel literature (see Ross and Buliung 2018) is disconcerting given that trips to and from school can produce remarkably difficult, inequitable and exclusionary experiences for some of the world’s estimated 120–150 million disabled children under 18 years of age (World Health Organization and World Bank 2011). Barriers impeding disabled children’s school journeys often add to and exacerbate other challenges they face within their education systems. Across Canada’s education system, for example, more than one in four people with disabilities have reported disability-focused bullying and, likewise, more than one in four have reported being avoided or socially excluded (Canadian Human Rights Commission (CHRC) 2017). These and other challenges within Canada’s education system have contributed to disabled people having lower levels of educational attainment. For example, in Canada, the range of people without disabilities reporting ‘below high school’ as their highest educational attainment is 15–33%, while the range for disabled people reporting this is 25–40% (CHRC 2017). This education gap has contributed to disabled people having fewer career options, experiencing under-employment, and having to deal with a disability wage gap (CHRC 2017).

Given what is known about disabled people’s educational barriers and outcomes, and, as shown in this chapter, barriers that impede their school journeys, it is vexing that the school travel literature has largely ignored experiences of childhood disability. Disabled children are widely acknowledged as having a right to equal access to education. This is evidenced by international agreements (e.g. the 2007 United Nations (UN) Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities; the 1989 UN Convention on the Rights of the Child), legislation (e.g. the United States’ 2004 Individuals with Disabilities Education Improvement Act; Australia’s 1992 Disability Discrimination Act; Canada’s 1982 Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms) and the widespread shift towards inclusive education throughout much of West that has been unfolding since the 1960s (e.g. mainstreaming/integration; Graves and Tracy 1998).

Introduction

This chapter examines how it is (im)possible for young people (children and adolescents) to move around the spaces of their daily lives autonomously. Why have some age groups all disappeared from the streets, except at the start and end of the school day? The focus is on the spatial dimension of social phenomena, an element rarely explored; increased traffic, the dangers of the road and fear of kidnapping or sexual assault are more often blamed for this. Connecting what goes on inside and outside homes explains the causes and consequences of this situation. Examining these gradual transformations allows directing the lines of thought toward identifying the reasons behind young people of all ages retreating into contemporary domestic spaces, whether deliberately or unintentionally. The events occurring between home and school indicate what becomes (im)possible for young people when it comes to freely exploring their world. Of all daily trips, the journey to school has come under particular scrutiny in recent decades, both from civil society (with the emergence of walking buses, school and play street schemes, etc.) and in the academic community, where interest has grown to include the habits of children outside institutional settings (home, school, etc.). This clearly requires from researchers to rethink their methods. The chapter concludes with considerations about methodology, aiming not to offer a way forward but to challenge approaches to conducting research with the younger generations. This final section should encourage reflection about the methodologies put into action in research and with the children and adolescents concerned, rather than attempting to understand them through the adults’ voices.

The reflections below result from several years of questioning the place of children (from early childhood through to young adulthood) in increasingly urbanised societies. This line of thought comes from the research group AFIN, through a study on adoption and adolescence which looked at how young people adopted from outside Catalonia moved around the city of Barcelona and perceived its public spaces. The researchers also examined the ways the adopted children bring diversity into the wider community, and the resulting changes to the evolution of society (Monnet, 2022). The scope of the study was then expanded, from looking at adopted children to examining the place of children and adolescents in Barcelona (Monnet and Arias 2016).

Introduction

In recent years, children’s travel behaviour, including active school transport (AST, such as walking and cycling), has attracted researchers from varying disciplines, such as urban planning, transportation and public health. Previous studies have shown that those who often walk or cycle to and from school are much more active than those who are driven and have more knowledge regarding their neighborhood environment (Mackett 2013). Research has also reported that AST plays a vital role in promoting children’s physical activity and can prevent and reduce childhood obesity (Mendoza et al. 2011). Furthermore, AST can contribute to children’s physical activity levels and positively impact children’s mental and psychological health (Fusco et al. 2012). In addition, it was estimated that as much as 10–14% of morning traffic is generated by parents driving their children to schools (McDonald et al. 2011). Similar trends have been documented in developing countries. It is also found that the traffic congestion indices of two weeks before and after school in Beijing can rise from 3–6 to 6–9 points (above six means moderate or severe congestion). And the capacity of the three-lane road around the school will drop 38% under the influence of student shuttle vehicle trips (Shi et al. 2014).

The problem caused by this traffic congestion on the roads near schools may create hazardous conditions for children traveling by non-motorized means and increase tail gas of automobiles that will contaminate the air that children breathe in and around their school. Despite AST’s significant health and environmental implications, AST has declined over the past few decades internationally (Buliung et al. 2011; Witten et al. 2013). For example, in the United States, the rate of AST declined from 47.7% in 1969 to 12.7% in 2009 (McDonald et al. 2011), and the share of children aged 5–9 who walked to school has decreased from 57.7% in 1971 to 25.5% in 2003 in Australia (Van der Ploeg et al. 2008).

Introduction

The objective of this chapter is to study the effects of a sustainable mobility object that has received little scholarly attention: the walking school bus (WSB). The chapter is based on a thesis work in urbanism and spatial planning (2018) and a project on the Emerging Risks of Sustainable Mobility (ANR-14-CE22-0010).

Ordinary as it may seem at first glance, the WSB has received extensive media coverage and political attention, as well as arousing genuine enthusiasm among some parents. While many have sought to promote it and advocate its qualities, it has featured little – one would say not enough – interest in the scientific community. Like other sustainable mobility objects (e.g. trams, selfservice bikes, ridesharing), this pedestrian version of the ‘school run’ has been targeted in communication campaigns intended to persuade people to shift their travel behaviours from the car to active modes, justified on the grounds of sustainable development and well-being (Pigalle 2021). Based on the concept of free modal choice, these publicity campaigns employ several discursive registers: empowerment, infantilisation, moralism or stigmatisation. They single out and classify ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ behaviours, ‘good’ and ‘bad’ users. This application of ideology in public policies tends to individualise social problems and to discipline urban behaviours, an approach that undermines critical standpoints and the organisation of collective opposition to public policies (Reigner 2016). Several authors have already shown the negative effects of this type of framing in terms of socio-spatial inequalities (Reigner and Brenac 2019). This framing is found not only in mobility and transport policies, but is also observable in obesity prevention campaigns (Bergeron et al. 2019), campaigns on household waste sorting and collection (Barbier 2002; Dumain and Rocher 2017; Rumpala 1999), on lifestyle patterns justified on sustainable city grounds (Boissonade 2015), on the control of domestic energy consumption (Levy et al. 2014, 2; Roudil 2018) or on household diet where differences are in reality governed by socio-economic factors (Plessz et al. 2016).

It would therefore seem worthwhile to explore the effects of little studied objects like the WSB, which are highly sensitive and difficult to challenge when child well-being is involved.

The Journey to School as an Object of Study

The school journey is an important part of the daily lives of all children attending school. Various studies, from a wide range of disciplines, have highlighted benefits and risks related to children’s journeys to school, providing insightful data regarding modes of transportation, health and well-being issues, school organisation and legislation, safety, urban development, and so on. In the past decades, several researchers have shown the decline of children’s independent mobility, on the way to and from school too, and the increase in the number of children being driven to school by parents (Frauendienst and Redecker 2011; McDonald 2008; Pooley et al. 2005; Ross 2007). In a car, children barely have the opportunity to interact with the environment, nor to benefit from physical activity after sitting for several hours in a class. Others have highlighted the individual, social and health benefits of autonomous mobility on the way to school. Such a journey can support the links between the child and his or her social and natural environment (Hüttenmoser 2004). Realities, however, vary immensely depending on the context as well as parental fears, concerns, perceptions and attitudes towards children travelling without adult supervision. Most of these studies focus on issues related to road safety and health. Moreover, adults are the main subjects surveyed, while the voices of children are rarely heard on this object and their experiences are not seriously solicited. From the perspective of children’s rights and active participation, this book aims to highlight children’s views and voices on and about their school journeys, as a subject of study in its own right, as well as to shed light on what are the valuable inputs which can support the creation of child-friendly school journeys.

In this collective work, transitional space – also identified as third, intermediate or interstitial space – is one of the key unifying concepts through which we study the way to and from school. Such a concept allows both to make visible the conjunction of various spaces of life, often considered separate (Djaoui 2016; Flamand 2005), and to take their respective specificities into account. Transitional spaces thus testify to an otherness towards the places that frame and host them (Migliore 2014), underscoring the reciprocal relationship of influence between the individual and the environment.

Introduction

In an increasingly hectic world, the places children move through as part of their everyday geographies become more and more important. The school journey is particularly interesting from this perspective as it serves as an entry point to children’s mundane geographies and reveals the specific contexts in which children live their lives. How children get to school, whether they are able to walk on their own or are taken by car as well as the design of the neighbourhood shape how children can engage with their community.

This chapter focuses on children who walk to school. It highlights that what might seem as a rather unremarkable everyday walk to school has substantial meaning and affects identity processes, belonging and relationship to place through the many entanglements that occur between the child and place. The text is based on fieldwork performed in Stockholm, Sweden, and draws on several research projects on children’s environments and participation in urban planning (Cele 2006, 2015, 2019). This contribution focuses on children who walk unaccompanied by adults in urban environments. The interest of this study lies in the fact that if children can move around on their own, they are autonomous in their social and environmental relationships, which shape their identity, their relationships with place and their understanding of the world.

This text focuses on how the school journey provides an excellent opportunity to engage with the local environment. The three concepts encounters, interactions and relationships are central to the chapter. These concepts are a starting point for describing how place experiences unfold during children’s walks to school. While walking the environment presents itself to the child through various encounters that can be social, material or sensory. Through these encounters, some of which are transient whereas others are more important, the child interacts with the surrounding world. The concept of interaction stresses the importance of a physical and embodied meeting between the child and place. Through this interaction, relationships are formed with the material world, the people, the community as well as with plants and animals. Some of these relationships are physical interactions or social encounters, but it is important to recognise that some of these relationships partly take place within the child.

Introduction

This chapter explores how girls between the ages of 10 and 17 in Cape Town and Abuja conceptualise dangers during their daily experiences of travelling, particularly when walking or taking public transport to school or an after-school club. Within particular areas of these cities, girls fear various dangers when travelling to school, such as rape, gun violence, traffic accidents, human trafficking or theft, and sometimes are exposed to severe insecurities on those journeys.

This data shed light on how young girls in Cape Town and Abuja talk about dangers. Still, it is essential to bear in mind that their experiences in these locations are unique and not representative of people living in other parts of the respective cities. Older women in Abuja and Cape Town emphasised the unreliability and cost of transport in their area as a key concern and mentioned harassment or dangers less frequently but emphasised that they still needed to travel despite these difficulties (Porter et al. 2021).

The children in Cape Town came from within and close by our two focus study sites (one inside and one outside the city boundary). Some of the children who participated in the focus group discussions – but not all – were from an area with a long history of gang violence – which is not necessarily typical of other townships around the city. In Abuja, our respondents, who were all girls, came from a satellite town outside the city boundary and another low-income neighbourhood located within the city boundary. In both sites, there are limited transport options, violence and traffic insecurities that were not commonplace all over the city. Just like many others, the respondents frequently travelled into the city centres, or travelled to school in their neighbourhoods.

In this chapter, Oldenburg’s theory of the third place is discussed in relation to studies of transport and security in the research’s city contexts, bearing in mind that his theory is developed in a very different setting. In his famous essay ‘The Third Place’, Oldenburg (1999) details how people in the United States enjoy so-called third places that allow them to meet informally – for instance, supermarkets, pubs or a street corner.

Introduction

When children’s well-being is compromised by their urban environments, the social sustainability of our cities is in question. Neighbourhoods are the fundamental unit of everyday experience for most children outside of home and school, offering varying opportunities for safe independent mobility, outdoor play and social interaction (Carroll et al. 2015). They not only determine the routines of everyday life but also strongly influence children’s physical, social and cognitive development and well-being (Lalli 1992; Min and Lee 2006; Tranter and Pawson 2001). Children learn through playful interaction with their surroundings and experiences of place contribute to child development (Moore 1986; Waygood et al. 2017). Play has often been called ‘the work of childhood’ (Piaget 1982).

Being out and about and playing in the public domain, once considered ‘a rite of passage of childhood’ (Alexander et al. 2014), has decreased in Aotearoa/New Zealand (NZ) as elsewhere (Carroll et al. 2015; Egli et al. 2020). So has that other childhood ‘rite of passage’, walking to and from school (Ministry of Transport 2009; Shaw et al. 2015). As walking to and from school affords many occasions for play and socialising along the way (Smith et al. 2020), these opportunities have diminished with its decline – including socialising with shop owners and other adults in the community (Carroll et al. 2015; Waygood and Friman 2015; Wood et al. 2010).

Cities are largely designed for adults and motor vehicles, not for children; ‘child blind’ urban planning (Gleeson and Sipe 2006) and safety discourses combine to limit children’s presence and play outside of home, school and child-designated destinations such as sportsgrounds, playgrounds and skateparks (Freeman and Tranter 2011; Randolph 2006; Woolley 2017). Indeed, children are rendered largely out of place in other public space, even though a city’s streets, alleyways, footpaths and verges – the places between destinations – remain important for everyday play and independent mobility. Formerly sites for play, city streets have been essentially transformed into ‘adult-only’ spaces (Karsten 2005). However, for some children at least, ‘the street’ still trumps backyards, sportsgrounds, parks and playgrounds as preferred outdoor space for play and hanging out with friends (Thomson and Philo 2004).

Large abstract blueish orbs fill the screen as a distinctive contemporary jazz-inflected beat invades the soundtrack. Splashes of purple intermingle with the blue orbs as the images become indiscernible and take on a feeling of aliveness. The music gives flesh to the abstract images, creating a contextual resonance with time and place. Upon a closer look, these abstract images embody the materiality of the fashion industry: colours, clothes, textures, mannequins, people and place. This is the opening of Mario Bava’s Blood and Black Lace/6 Donne Per L’Assassino (1964). The opening credit sequence reminds just how performative music is, and that indeed it is often the main character in a genre like the Italian giallo—a genre that Bava is often credited with creating. In Blood and Black Lace, Bava’s second giallo, the music and fashion house setting combine to make something that is very contemporaneously queer. I have spiraled back to the early 1960s to end this study of Grand-Guignol cinema, eschewing linear readings of films in this lineage and instead championing some monstrously queer ones.

This is not the first discussion of music in Grand-Guignol cinema in this text; I discussed the place of jazz in cinematic themes of race in the 1930s US in Chapter 2. As discussed in that chapter, focus on sound need not depoliticise. The jazz under discussion here in Blood and Black Lace, written by the prolific Italian composer, Carlo Rustichelli, resonates with an intense contemporaneity of the 1960s. Its rhythm betrays influence of Brazilian bossa nova, popular all over the West at the time. Thinking through a film’s score is part of reading a film through the corporeal and sensorial. Such readings give materiality to representational readings that tend to reinforce dichotomous thinking. In the relational event of affective cinema viewership, one is thinking-feeling in a productively embodied way. In affective viewership, then, questions of race, class, gender and sexuality are not bypassed, but materially fleshed-out. In this Conclusion, I will draw out the theme of sexuality intersectionally in relation to a critique of capitalism—and of course always in relation to the corporeal. Bava’s film is set in the fashion industry after all.

Introduction

I deliberately chose to end this study with an overview of the nuances that dictate the texts produced by African memoirs, especially from other regions of the continent not given attention in the preceding chapters. I opened with a broader Africa-wide orientation of the memoirs, and I want to close with some peculiarities that I have framed as “regional.” As a mode of writing, the memoir—which can be categorized under the (auto)biography genre—has received much attention in recent times. It has been classified as a form of fiction with dashes of believability and a semblance of truth. Critics like James Olney and Paul John Eakin have noted the autobiography/ biography bifurcation and the interpenetration of the two forms. Autobiographers become biographers when they focus on parents, siblings, and significant other persons in their lives.

Conversely, one who injects personal details into a narrative of another life ends up producing an autobiography. To adapt James Olney’s idea of the open-endedness of autobiography, an autobiography half emerges in the act of living and writing about others. People can write their lives’ stories obliquely by writing the life of another, a status Eakin calls crypto-autobiography. Commenting on her own life and work, Bretell says, “as a book by a daughter about a mother who was a writer, this text involves a blending of voice, by extension, a blurring of genre … it is both a biography and an autobiography, not only because the lives of a mother and a daughter are inextricably intertwined.” This is natural because people do not live in isolation. The lives of people in society interpenetrate, and people define themselves in terms of the mutual inter-influencing of their lives and those of the people around them. Thus, a life is given significance by the social milieu, the culture in which it is found.

As an important mode of the narrative genre, the functions of a memoir are numerous. Even though it is a writing about the life of a singular individual, it can be viewed to perform the role of preservation, documentation, and, most importantly, offering representations of behavioral patterns to be followed and imbibed by readers.

A WOODBLOCK PRINT OF Wu Zhao crowned with an elaborate imperial phoenix headdress appears in the section on “historical personages” in the early seventeenth-century Ming dynasty Illustrated Encyclopedia of Heaven, Earth, and Man (Sancai tuhui 三彩圖會; see Figure 1). While the broad forehead and square face of the grand dame depicted fit earlier descriptions of Wu Zhao appearing in standard histories, this conventionalized depiction of a cinch-lipped matron clad in ceremonial imperial regalia—and sporting an expression between irked and dour beneath her long, arched brows and above her rounded chin—does little to capture the robust personality and idiosyncratic character of China’s only female emperor.

Predominantly negative in tenor, standard historical accounts of Wu Zhao nonetheless reflect a grudging appreciation of her far-reaching intellect and enormous capacity for subtle machinations. The Old Tang History characterizes her as “intelligent and tactful, possessing vast literary and historical learning.” Attesting to her weiqi master’s ability to calculate and strategize, the New Tang History remarks that she “possessed a diverse repertoire of means for wielding power and was capable of countless tactical changes and permutations.”

Though Zhang Zhuo spent much of his career outside of the capitals, he served as a Censor in Wu Zhao’s court. As mentioned in the Introduction, his characterization of the female emperor and her close adherents is congruent with a wider Confucian historiography that systematically demonizes her person and denigrates her reign. While passages in Court and Country offer glimpses of her character and personality, they also emphasize Wu Zhao’s volatile swings between delight and rage, her uncritical acceptance of auspicious omens, and her penchant for luxury and excess. Most of these anecdotes lack the idiosyncrasies and nuance of Zhang’s other stories. It is likely they were altered and flattened, retrofitted to Confucian precepts at some point between Zhang’s death and the reappearance of an abridged Court and Country in the Ming, 800 years later.

OMENS AND SYMBOLS

Symbols and omens exercised an inordinate power in the world of Wu Zhao. Take, for example, this story from Court and Country of a staged cat-and-parrot show gone terribly awry:

DONALD WYATT OBSERVED THAT “WU ZHAO’s own propensity for the wanton perpetration of violence against her perceived domestic enemies […] helped clear her path of real and imagined obstructers by the thousands.” Wyatt is right: her “cruel officials” (ku li 酷吏) were an essential part of her political authority, the umbrageous yin that complemented the sunny yang of aesthetes eloquently singing her praises and colorful ceremonies staged to validate her power. Therefore, any effort to scrutinize the dark countenance of the Janus-faced female sovereign needs to examine the modus operandi of these brutal henchmen; they helped Wu Zhao quash her opposition and consolidate power, particularly in the years immediately before and following her establishment of the Zhou dynasty in 690.

Wu Zhao was certainly not the first ruler to ruthlessly deploy strongarms to gain and consolidate power: prior to her reign, records attest to more than a millennium of draconian punishments exacted by countless “cruel officials” throughout early and early medieval Chinese history. Sima Qian began cata-loging the careers of such men in Records of the Grand Historian, the template for later dynastic histories. Explaining his rationale for including biographies of such individuals, he wrote, “When the people turn their backs on what is basic and are too ingenious, they ravage traditions and play with the laws, so that even the good among them cannot be transformed and only a thorough severity can return them to good order. Thus, I wrote ‘The Cruel Officials.’” While acknowledging their drawbacks, the celebrated annalist recognized, despite (or, arguably, because of) their cruelty and violence, a certain con-structive value, a political utility, in the actions of these men. Toward the end of their collective biography, the Grand Historian observed, “The virtues of these ten men can be taken as models, their vices as a warning. These men, by their schemes and strategies, their teaching and leadership, restricted wickedness and ended evil. Although harsh, these men did what their duty prescribed.” There is a clear recognition, even a begrudging appreciation, for the guiding role that such individuals play in fostering order through draconian measures, extirpating evil to help stabilize the empire.

Early Days of Environmental Philosophy: the Problem of Dualism

In the 1970s–1980s a radical critique of traditional Western approaches to nature emerged simultaneously at various flashpoints in the Western world, notably Australia, Norway and the USA.

The Norwegian critique emanated from philosopher Arne Naess who became the founder of the deep ecology movement. In the USA a handful of emerging philosophers, amongst them Holmes Rolston, Baird Callicott and Eugene Hargrove, gave voice to their environmental concerns in a new journal, Environmental Ethics. There was a less well-known but just as trenchant Australian critique from the Routleys (later known as Richard Sylvan and Val Plumwood) at the Australian National University. All these early philosophers recognized that the environmental problems that were coming into view at that time were the result not merely of faulty policies and technologies but of underlying attitudes to the natural world that were built into the very foundations of Western thought.

For all of them, the notion of anthropocentrism was key to these attitudes. Anthropocentrism was the groundless belief, amounting to nothing more than prejudice, that only human beings matter, morally speaking; to the extent that anything else – animals, plants, ecosystems, the natural world generally – matters, it does so only because it has some kind of utility for human beings. Together, these early philosophers challenged this assumption and asked, as Richard Routley put it in his 1973 paper of the same name, ‘is there a need for a new, an environmental, ethic?’. By an environmental ethic they meant an ethic of nature, an ethic that treats nature as morally considerable in its own right.

This early challenge to anthropocentrism set the agenda for the new discipline of environmental philosophy, which proceeded to mature through the 1980s and 1990s as a new generation of thinkers joined the inquiry.

Why, these philosophers wondered, had the West developed such a blinding moral prejudice against nature and in favour of humanity? It was clear that some kind of dualism or binarism was at work – a dichotomizing tendency that set the human apart from and above nature. The human stood as the measure of all meaning and value against the brute facticity of nature.

This book has been concerned with a number of inter-related phenomena: a seeming rejection, on the part of some writers, of fiction, fabrication, and conventional forms of the novel in favour of a turn towards the auto/ biographical and/or work with a closer connection to the lived experience and existential realities of its authors. From the radical realism of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle series with its thick description and detailed representation of everyday life alongside the thoughts, feelings and reflections of narrator-protagonist Karl Ove, as he navigates the world around him, and seeks to realize his vocation as a writer, to the reinvention of the novel form actualized by Rachel Cusk in her ‘Outline’ trilogy following the malfunctioning, as she saw it, of her life-writing, there has been a rethinking of the affordances and rationale of the novel and its relationship to fact and fiction.

The seeming conflation of novel and fiction has been interrogated anew as writers such as Knausgaard and Cusk use and stretch the form to enable their investigations into the kind of links that may pertain between literature and life, and art and reality, addressing issues such as self-definition and the function of writing in the face of loss and trauma. After his father’s death, Knausgaard recalibrates his relationship to the world and to those around him. He is both liberated by the process and at the same time forced to re-assess his conception of self, in the wake of the removal of the person who stood for many years in opposition to him, and whose presence helped define him both as a young boy and as an adult. Volume 1, A Death in the Family, has been described as a narrative of filiation (Meekings 2019, 420), in which ‘[t]he microscopic gaze […] is a symptom of the self-concept trying to understand (and so renegotiate) its altered relationality to the world around it’ (420).