After London - Jefferies, Richard

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Résumé :
This sci-fi classic depicts a London destroyed by a cataclysmic event, with the remnants of England's population beginning a primitive society in the countryside. With a background in studying the rural regions of England, professional naturalist turned novelist Richard Jefferies took to authoring a story that imagined a world in which nature emerges victorious over the encroaching industrialized world. London - the epicentre of urban activity and industrial progress - undergoes a disaster which wipes its human population, and much of England's, from existence. Jefferies investigates the aftermath of the disaster, as communities of people begin to form anew. The traces of London are gradually subsumed by nature, its ruined buildings worn away by water, plants and trees rising to reclaim the land upon which the metropolis sat. By contrast nature and man flourish anew in a mostly harmonious partnership. Today, After London is considered an early example of apocalyptic science fiction, a novelization of the author's own distrust and distaste for the cramped, polluted conditions that rapid industrialization brought upon England. It is his want of a world reborn that produces the most evocative passages, with many such descriptions serving as a philosophic forerunner to modern, environmentalist and conservationist movements....

Biographie:
John Richard Jefferies (6 November 1848 - 14 August 1887) was an English nature writer, noted for his depiction of English rural life in essays, books of natural history, and novels. His childhood on a small Wiltshire farm had a great influence on him and provides the background to all his major works of fiction.

Jefferies's corpus of writings covers a range of genres and topics, including Bevis (1882), a classic children's book, and After London (1885), a work of science fiction. For much of his adult life he suffered from tuberculosis, and his struggles with the illness and with poverty also play a role in his writing. Jefferies valued and cultivated an intensity of feeling in his experience of the world around him, a cultivation that he describes in detail in The Story of My Heart (1883). This work, an introspective depiction of his thoughts and feelings about the world, gained him the reputation of a nature mystic at the time, but it is his success in conveying his awareness of nature and people within it, both in his fiction and in essay collections such as The Amateur Poacher (1879) and Round About a Great Estate (1880), that has drawn most admirers. Walter Besant wrote of his reaction on first reading Jefferies: Why, we must have been blind all our lives; here were the most wonderful things possible going on under our very noses, but we saw them not.