“Deep Landscape”: Annie Proulx’s Relational Ontology of the More-than-Human World

Annie Proulx’s “deep landscape” is generally considered within environmental ethics or New Regionalism. Recent criticism has turned to the colonial-capitalist structures behind ecological destruction, yet how those concerns cohere, or the material-ontological implications of “deep landscape” itself, remain largely unexamined. Departing from Proulx’s own concept, and drawing on new materialism and material ecocriticism, this paper argues that “deep landscape” is not a geographical backdrop of human activity but an ontological field where humans and nonhumans co-constitute one another. Reading across her novels and short stories, the paper traces this ontology through a “being—relation—becoming” model: the re-enchantment of nature restores ontological legitimacy to the more-than-human world; trans-corporeal material exchanges reveal an ontological relation between humans and nonhumans; and material agency, across temporal scales beyond individual lives, redistributes history across human and nonhuman actors. Because material agency carries no intrinsic ethical direction, the same landscape can sustain different human responses, and history emerges from interaction, not human intention alone. This paper thus puts Proulx beyond an ethics of human–nature harmony towards a relational ontology of material coexistence. Her fiction therefore exemplifies how narrative can reimagine life, history, and ecological coexistence in the age of the nonhuman turn.