Introduction

Abstract

This chapter provides an overview of the book’s main topics and approach. Given the crucial role played by the concept of “nature” in present-day discourses, as some examples briefly discussed in the first paragraph demonstrate, its analysis will be carried out, recalling crucial references in relevant literature, in an interdisciplinary perspective (Chap. 2). Subsequently, the discursivisation of nature in different domains will be considered, ranging from the iconography of Mother Nature between the past and the present (Chap. 3) to the representation of catastrophic events in fictional and non-fictional discourses (Chap. 4), from “clean eating” and other popular contemporary food trends based on “natural mythologies” (Chap. 5) to the multiple meanings and values attributed to the naked body (especially in relation to the ambivalence between its supposed natural ascription and its multiple cultural characterisations) in different contexts (Chap. 6). Finally, Chap. 7 draws some conclusions on the analysed dynamics, also illustrating a possible path towards an “internatural” turn through a particularly relevant case study.

So, nature is not a physical place to which one can go, nor a treasure to fence in or bank, nor as essence to be saved or violated. Nature is not hidden and so does not need to be unveiled. Nature is not a text to be read in the codes of mathematics and biomedicine. It is not the “other” who offers origin, replenishment, and service. Neither mother, nurse, nor slave, nature is not matrix, resource, or tool for the reproduction of man.

Nature is, however, a topos, a place, in the sense of a rhetorician’s place or topic for consideration of common themes; nature is, strictly, a commonplace. We turn to this topic to order our discourse, to compose our memory. … Nature is also a trópos, a trope. It is figure, construction, artifact, movement, displacement. Nature cannot pre-exist its construction.

Donna Haraway, The Promises of Monsters (1992).