The beauty of the book group

: ecocritical encounters with nature and narrative through autoethnography and IPA

摘要

In this thesis I ask how readers relate to the environment and the climate crises through reading fiction and having literary and environmental conversations in a reading group, and I explore my own relationship to nature, literature, and climate through autoethnographic writing. The aim of this thesis is to explore lived experiences of people who read novels and discuss them in a reading group, and show how the relationships between humans, the more than-human, and literary fiction is inextricably entangled. The research shows how readers consider reading as an act of joy and a tool to understand the world, how readers value the
community of a reading group, and how reading groups can lead them to further learning and acknowledgement of governmental and societal responsibilities in the climate crises.
Analysing the data collected through interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA) and autoethnographical writing, the thesis acknowledges and explores the embodiment and entanglement between reader, novel, community, and the natural world. Situated in a body of work that explores interdisciplinary approaches to the climate crises, this thesis aims to add to the existing research in empirical ecocriticism, in which methods such as IPA and autoethnography are not widely used. The significance of this study is how it shows that reading books not necessarily defined as climate fiction (cli-fi) can still inspire conversation and discussion around environmental topics, and that reading groups can, in
accordance with other studies on reading groups, be spaces for learning, community building, and gaining new perspectives on the climate crises.

奖励日期	9 9月 2026
源语言	English
奖励机构	University of the Highlands and Islands
导师	Vicky Johnson (Supervisor) & Sarah Wagner (Supervisor)