Transitivity and agency in Richard Jefferies’s rural essays: an ecostylistic analysis

Abstract

This essay aims to provide an ecostylistic analysis of transitivity and agency in selected extracts from Richard Jefferies’s late nineteenth-century rural essays, which were collected in his so-called country books. Jefferies’s portrayal of the interconnection between humans and the natural environment has been variously described as “pantheistic”, a “pantheist revery”, or an “ecstatic communion”. The present study proposes to validate these claims by showing that Jefferies’s essays utilise patterns of transitivity to depict manifold relationships between human and non-human agents in placid landscape descriptions. These can be regarded as positive discourse praising the rural environment and humans’ entanglement with other animal and vegetable organisms. An in-depth scrutiny of the linguistic patterns of Jefferies’s texts, corroborated by the theoretical and methodological framework of (eco)stylistics and related disciplines (i.e. Systemic Functional Grammar), offers useful insights into the author’s ecosophy and holistic understanding of the human and non-human world. By conceptualising the various constitutive elements of the physical environment as active/agentive participants in particular types of processes, Jefferies gives special prominence to ecocentric, rather than anthropocentric positions.