A voice in the wilderness: James Rebanks’The Shepherd’s Lifeas a “travellee polemic”

This article frames James Rebanks’ The Shepherd’s Life (2015) – an account of farming in the English Lake District – as a contemporary “travellee polemic”, using a term developed by Wendy Bracewell (2015) to describe ripostes penned by European travellees to denigrating travellers’ accounts of their own home-places in the eighteenth century. It argues that The Shepherd’s Life is similarly a riposte to outsider accounts of the Lake District, including those found in contemporary “new nature writing”. The book is compared to Robert Macfarlane’s The Wild Places (2007), with particular attention paid to contrasting versions of the “monarch-of-all-I-survey scene”, in which Macfarlane depopulates and exoticises the landscape, while Rebanks emphasises its human and homely aspects and destabilises the conventional shared writer-reader gaze. The article argues that paying attention to travellee polemics – both historical and contemporary – helpfully problematises essentialised notions of travellee muteness and powerlessness.