Ambience and the 'symbiotic real': an ecocritical ready of It Must Have Been Dark By Then

This essay draws on Morton’s ecological Marxism in dialogue with the ambient poetics of the Ambient Literature Project, viewing them as parallel fields which can be usefully folded into one another to develop their common ground. The Ambient Literature Project was a thirty-month project led by Professor Jon Dovey at the University of the West of England’s Digital Cultures Research Centre which focused on investigating ‘situated writing practices in which text is able to respond to the site of reading’; what they term “ambient literature”. The project had multiple outcomes, including a critical book containing academic perspectives on ambience and ambient literature, empirical research on locational technologies and literary form, and the production of three creative texts. This essay draws heavily from the academic work contained within Ambient Literature (2021), establishing links between the writing of Jonathon Dovey and Matt Hayler and the ecocriticism of Morton by deploying one of the project’s creative ambient texts, It Must Have Been Dark By Then.