This thesis demonstrates how outdoor swimming offers multiple ways of understanding the identity politics of contemporary nature writing. Participation in outdoor swimming has grown significantly in recent years, and there has been a concurrent proliferation in autobiographical texts representing immersion in salt and fresh water. This thesis analyses seven works of contemporary nature writing, from 1999 to 2021, and argues that the swimmer is an ecological figure significant to contemporary issues including land and water access, well-being and climate breakdown, and belonging. I employ a theoretical framework which combines material ecocriticism and critical phenomenology. The thesis contributes to the emerging field of the blue humanities through its analysis of relationships between human cultures and blue spaces, and it furthers critical discussion of the identity politics of contemporary nature writing.
Chapter One explores Roger Deakin’s Waterlog: A Swimmer’s Journey through Britain (1999) as an exercise in literary cartography which not only reveals blue spaces but draws attention to the politics of access to them. Examining whiteness and gender in the travel form of the narrative, my analysis of Waterlog develops the discussion of land and water access in Deakin’s text while drawing critical attention to issues of race and gender in the nature writing genre more widely.
Chapter Two investigates the representation of nature cure in three texts: Al Alvarez’s Pondlife: A Swimmer’s Journal (2013), Joe Minihane’s Floating: A Life Regained (2017) and Jessica J Lee’s Turning: A Swimming Memoir (2017). I explore the role of freshwater immersion in these eco-recovery narratives, and demonstrate how gender politics influence the forms of nature cure depicted in these texts, as well as how the concept of nature cure is complicated by strange weather and climate breakdown.
In Chapter Three, I conceptualise belonging as an oceanic feeling through my close reading of three texts related by their mutual interest in saltwater swimming and island spaces: Victoria Whitworth’s Swimming with Seals (2017), Tamsin Calidas’s I am an Island (2020), and Nina Mingya-Powles’s Small Bodies of Water (2021). The chapter shows that immersion in saltwater can be conducive to oceanic forms of belonging which may help confront dominant forms of belonging predicated on rootedness.
