Introducing the Literary North

Abstract

The north of England has been subjected to stereotype, misrepresentation and myth. Although this has been examined in various cultural forms,¹ the Literary North of England has not hitherto been considered in any systematic way. In focusing on the Literary North, the essays in this collection examine the strategies and recurring motifs in literature in English from the mid-nineteenth to the twenty-first century. Beginning with the association of the North with industrialization, Josephine Guy considers the mythologizing construction of the North in the industrial novel of the mid-nineteenth century. The city of Manchester, in particular, has been rendered a synecdoche for industrialization. The diversity of Manchester’s thriving business, artistic and cultural landscape has been occluded by the overpowering image of the grimy mills. Guy restores the significant fact that Manchester’s rising power and its potential to challenge the metropolis emerges just at the point when novelists such as Elizabeth Gaskell were strategically representing it in such starkly contrasting terms.