The body of writing about nature from Aristotle to Attenborough constitutes a cultural heritage which has had and continues to have multiple effects over the centuries on our thoughts and on our lives. It has in common the belief that there is ‘something out there’ called nature which can be studied in detail (however the descriptions come to be refined or varied over time) and analysed theoretically (however provisional or contradictory particular theories may prove to be). But interwoven with this – contradicting, confirming, influencing – there has been a long tradition of exploring why and how nature expresses something about ourselves as individuals and as human beings, including the hopes and expectations we project onto, or demand of, the reality out there. In poems, novels, plays and essays written throughout the centuries, ‘nature’ is the term used to give a voice to the full range of our most passionate feelings, to our basest as well as our highest thoughts. In the process, sometimes the attempt has been made to stand outside the closed room of those needs and give nature a voice.

As a result, literary tradition, the written creative expression of ourselves as human beings, constitutes a major cultural heritage of our preoccupation with nature. This preoccupation – this need to find in nature a mirror which clarifies and expresses the vagaries, pleasures and pains of our human condition – is a double mirror. Certainly, it reveals what we demand of nature as our reflection, but in the course of doing so it both exhibits and critiques what the modes of expectation embodied in our writing allow us to think and to feel about the natural world. The sequence of chapters in this book is committed to keeping that double mirror in mind. It explores the various ways using nature as a mirror has contributed to the images of ourselves and our society revealed in our literary culture; at the same time, it acknowledges how various pathetic fallacies of nature (a term used throughout this book and explained more fully in the Introduction) embodied in literary stances and tropes have contributed to our inherited understanding of the natural world.