Mapping the Wessex Novel: Landscape, History and the Parochial in British Literature, 1870-1940

Description

By discussing the work of Thomas Hardy, Richard Jefferies, John Cowper Powys and Mary Butts, Mapping the Wessex Novel imaginatively maps and excavates various districts of the 'west country' so as radically to redefine the 'parochial'; while being keenly aware of their own status as natives locked into complex histories of self-exile and return, estrangement and ardent identification. Contributing to the growing research on space and place in Victorian and Modernist writing, Radford uses the analysis of these writers as a lens through which to inspect the relationship between rural periphery and metropolitan centre; contested ideologies of 'Englishness' and the form of the national past.

Andrew Radford is Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Glasgow, UK.

'Radford offers an astute and timely study of the significance that Wessex occupied from the late nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century in the writings of Thomas Hardy, Richard Jefferies, John Cowper Powys, and Mary Butts. In mapping these imaginative responses to, and constructions of, Wessex Radford, skilfully, excavates the sedimentary layers of archaeology, geology, mythology, and folklore that lie beneath this geographic region and circumscribe the complexity of the politics of place, of outsider and native, of national and provincial identity, at stake for these literary representations of the West Country.' -- Mark Sandy, Senior Lecturer in English, Durham University, UK