The genre of nature writing in effect begins in the 18th -century with writers like Gilbert White, for whom nature as nature-not as a symbol of something beyond it－is placed in the foreground, and for whom this nature is taken as a whole of which humans are just one part. The revolutionary aspects of this new “literary” approach to nature have a certain connection to the revolutionary sociopolitical changes taking place in Europe and North America in the late 18th century (“Romantic” period). But the purest, most direct description of nature must inevitably be a “scientific” description, one which is essentially non-fictional-as in White or Thoreau. This presents a kind of dilemma: on the one hand “nature writing” cannot be as scientific as science itself, since we are still concerned here with a sort of concrete narrative prose (the narrator as naturalist, observer of nature) and not with the abstractions of biology, chemistry or physics; on the other hand such writing cannot be mythic, metaphorical or symbolic in the manner of (traditional, modernist and postmodernist) narrative “fiction,” since after all it is fundamentally “non-fictional.” The argument set forth here is that nature writing must then steer a kind of middle course between these two alternatives. Therefore this genre needs to be more clearly situated in relation to postmodern discussions of “grand narratives” (Lyotard)－if even history and science are narratives then there is no “absolute truth”－and of the discontinuous stages of a European history (Foucault in The Order of Things) which moved from a pre-1600s “world of resemblances” (“signs”) to a post-1600s Galilean world of “analogy” and “representation.”