Abstract
How does a space become a sacred place5 how does an area that was once disregarded and seen as waste become a heritage site, a tourist attraction for people seeking spiritual succor? Today, Dartmoor is such a place a National Park, a shrine for literary tourists, and a pilgrimage site for the New Age, where nature discloses the supernatural, and the present is saturated with the spirits of the past. Oral lore, some ancient, some of modern invention, is recycled in print: pixies; druids; beasts of Dartmoor; hounds of the Baskervilles are transformed from local folktales to text circulating globally via the World Wide Web. What was once seen as being empty, as a dreariness, is now quested after: a zone brought into geographical focus and cultural meaning by people’s desire to encounter the Other. Dartmoor is, that is to say, uncanny, its cultural purpose is to provide a physical trace of the noumenal everything we think we cannot find in the urban, suburban, materialist world of motorways and retail parks but be reachable by car. It offers a containable sublime where we can meet the ghosts of our own yearnings before driving back to the village for a B & B and cream tea.
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Notes
See also the discussion by Lynn Abrams, in chapter six of Oral History Theory (New York & London: Routledge, 2010), 106–129. (Much of Abrams’s discussion concerns a structuralist approach, however, which is rarely still used by contemporary literary scholars since the 1980s and is, as Abrams indicates, more pertinent to linguistics.)
William Bottrell, Stories and Folk-lore of West Cornwall (Penzance, 1880), p.iii.
For some theoretical context on the role of orality in Scotland’s attempts to establish a sense of nationhood in the nineteenth century, and reflection on how the oral is always about to be lost, see Penny Fielding, Writing and Orality: Nationality, Culture, and Nineteenth-Century Scottish Fiction (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996). This study also contains a discussion of James Hogg’s and Walter Scott’s “different attempts to represent oral storytelling in print,” attempts which differ considerably from but are comparable to those discussed in part one of this collection (101 ff).
Robert Southey, Letters from England; by Don Manuel Alvarez Espriella. Translated from the Spanish (London: Longman, 1807).
Robert Southey, Sir Thomas More: or, Colloquies on the Progress and Prospects of Society, 2 vols. (London: Murray, 1829).
Robert Southey, review in Quarterly Review, 59 (1737), 275–312.
Eliza Bray, Traditions, Legends, Superstitions, and Sketches of Devonshire on the Borders of the Tamar and the Tavy, Illustrative of its Manners, Customs, History, Antiquities, Scenery, and Natural History, in a Series of Letters to Robert Southey, Esq., 3 vols. (London: Murray, 1838).
William Borlase, Antiquities, Historical and Monumental, of the County of Cornwall, 2nd ed. (London: W. Bowyer and J. Nichols, 1769), 116; Richard Polwhele, The History of Devonshire, 3 vols. (Exeter: printed by Trewman and Son, for Cadell, Johnson, and Dilly, London, 1793–1806). Polwhele’s History of Cornwall is the subject of the next chapter in this book, by Dafydd Moore.
Eliza Bray, A Peep at the Pixies, or Legends of the West (London: Grant and Griffith, 1854).
Eliza Bray, Fitz of Fitz-ford, vol. 4 of The Novels and Romances of Anna Eliza Bray, 10 vols. (London: Longman and Brown, 1845), 462.
Jan Marsh, Christina Rossetti: a Writer’s Life (London & New York: Viking, 1994), 230.
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© 2011 Shelley Trower
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Fulford, T. (2011). Romanticizing the West Country: or, Hell-Hounds in Hard Cover and Pixies in Print. In: Trower, S. (eds) Place, Writing, and Voice in Oral History. Palgrave Studies in Oral History. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230339774_2
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