"I've escaped not from life but out into it": A contemporary literary approach to the human presence into the natural landscape in Andrew Greig's book 'At the loch of the Green Corrie' and poetry collection 'Getting higher'.

Abstract

The present dissertation focuses on the works of the Scottish writer Andrew Greig, the novel At the loch of the Green Corrie (2011) and his poetry collection Getting Higher (2010), with the aim of better understanding his personal interpretation of the human presence into the natural landscape. To do so, an introduction on the author and on his works is given, together with the exploration of the intimate admiration for his friend and mentor – the Scottish poet Norman MacCaig. Through the pages of Greig’s book At the loch of the Green Corrie, the expansion on their relationship gives light to their shared Scottish identity in the fast-changing environment of the Scottish Highlands, and to their personal bond with Scotland’s natural landscape. Moreover, the present dissertation tries to give enough space to the central activity of fishing, in order to look at it from as many different angles as possible, while also meditating about the metaphorical standpoint that it assumes under the author’s eyes. As a final act, the present analysis looks at Greig’s works through the lens of Ecocriticism. Beginning from his memoir book and from its biographical considerations of the relationship between the human and the non-human, further considerations are made by looking at his mountain poems and at his philosophy of walking –a common act that finds its place in Greig’s interpretation of human life on the Planet.