This book began life in a graduate course on the genre of the essay at the University of Mainz and has since crossed the channel. At the University of Bath it was continued as a Ph.D. project and completed with the help of a series of supervision sessions over the course of approximately three years. While my thanks go to Dieter Lamping and Stephan Leopold for providing valuable advice during my time in Mainz, the research environment in England could not have been more supportive to the further development of this project and that is in great part owing to Axel Goodbody, Nina Parish, and Richard Kerridge as literary scholars and individuals. I could not have done it without their energy and expertise, their knowledge and enthusiasm, their patience and encouragement, and the laughter we shared. I am truly grateful for all the above.
Funding for this research project was generously provided by the German Heinrich Böll foundation, while a Graduate School Scholarship of the University of Bath took away the burden of having to pay English tuition fees. Again, I would like to thank my lead-supervisor, Axel Goodbody, for encouraging me to apply for funding and supporting me in every possible way. I am thankful for the privilege of having had three years at my disposal, in which I could focus mainly on my research. In this context, I should also like to thank my parents, Eva and Thomas Schröder, and my brother Philipp Schröder for their ongoing support, and likewise Jutta and Werner Widmann. Without a second base in the Rhine-Main area it would have been much more difficult to realise a Ph.D. project that profited immensely from my journeys back and forth between the UK and the European continent. Access to the reading rooms of the British Library, the Senate House Library, and University College London Library, in addition to the research facilities in Bath, while still having University of Mainz’s library at my disposal, made for a vibrant working environment. Also, I owe thanks to Kate Rigby and David Clarke who turned my viva into an inspiring conversation that added several interesting ideas to my manuscript.
During my time as a Ph.D. student, I benefited from various opportunities to present my research at conferences and summer schools. Among them the 2013 Summer School of the Austrian Institut für Kulturwissenschaft (ifk) that was so kind as to invite me as a stipendiary; the 2014 Würzburg Summer School for Cultural and Literary Animal Studies; the 2014 conference on ecological genres of the dfg-Netzwerk “Ethik und Ästhetik in literarischen Repräsentationen ökologischer Transformationen” at the University of Bayreuth; the 2015 asle conference at the University of Idaho; the 2015 asle-uki conference at Murray Edwards College, University of Cambridge; the 2016 Sylvia Naish
During my time in London, I joined a nonfiction book club. The discussions we had complemented my research in intriguing and unexpected ways. Among the titles on our reading list was the memoir The Iceberg by the British artist Marion Coutts. When thinking about a possible cover illustration her beautiful art works came to mind. I was thrilled that Marion generously gave her consent to use “Cartouche”. Also, I am pleased to be in the Nature, Culture and Literature series. I shall like to thank the editors and the board who made this possible. I feel that this series is the right environment for what is now a book. I owe thanks to the staff at Brill | Rodopi for taking such good care of my manuscript and to the two anonymous peer reviewers who steered my writing in many good directions. During my further immersion in the literary world, I also got to meet some of the brilliant nature writers I discuss. I am particularly grateful for having made the acquaintance of Robert Macfarlane, Marion Poschmann, Judith Schalansky, and Eliot Weinberger. Both academic contexts, German and English, have inspired this book, but countless private conversations have also fed into it. Talking with others about the nature essay, but also about literature in general and the place and meaning it can hold in one’s life encouraged me to pursue this research project. I should like to mention my conversations – some more recent than others – with Hans Jürgen Balmes, Hannes Becker, Thorsten Dönges, Katharina Dorn, Christof Gahlen, Jessica Güsken, Jakob Heller, Sabrina Jaromin, Judith Keller, Mary Kuhn, Jyl Millard, Denise Reimann, Linn Schiemann, Katrin Thomaneck, Nicola Thomas, Ulrike Weymann, and most importantly with Martin Widmann, who was during this project effectively a fourth supervisor, the best proof reader I can think of and, as always, much more than that.