Abstract
‘If one wanted to show a foreigner England’, wrote E.M. Forster in Howards End, ‘perhaps the wisest course would be to take him to the final section of the Purbeck Hills, and stand him on their summit, a few miles to the east of Corfe’. From such an elevation, ‘system after system of our island would roll together’ at the visitor’s feet, until ‘reason fails, like a wave on the Swanage beach; the imagination swells, spreads, and deepens, until it becomes geographic and encircles England’.1
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Notes
E.M. Forster, Howards End (London: Edward Arnold, 1910), pp.164–165.
Alun Howkins, ‘The Discovery of Rural England’, in Englishness, Politics, and Culture, 1880–1920, ed. by Robert Colls and Philip Dodd (London: Croom Helm, 1987), pp.66–88;
Martin Wiener, English Culture and the Decline of the Industrial Spirit, 1850–1980, 2nd edn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).
Patrick Wright, The Village that Died for England, 2nd edn (London: Faber and Faber, 2002), p.xvi. Wright’s book focuses on the village of Tyneham and the area around Lulworth.
For a discussion of the genealogy of the term “microhistory”, see Carlo Ginzburg, ‘Microhistory: Two or Three Things That I Know about It’, in Threads and Traces: True False Fictive, trans. by Anne C. Tedeschi and John Tedeschi (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012), pp.193–214. Ginzburg’s identification of a form of ‘narrative history’ that breaks with the narrative conventions of ‘late-nineteenth-century novels’ and does not transform ‘the gaps in the documentation into a smooth surface’ is particularly significant in this context. Ginzburg, ‘Microhistory’, p.204.
Ysanne Holt, British Artists and the Modernist Landscape (Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing, 2003), p.151.
Raymond Williams, ‘When Was Modernism?’, in The Politics of Modernism: Against the New Conformists, ed. by Tony Pinkney (London: Verso, 1989), pp.31–35 (p.35).
Macfarlane holds up this dying culture as one in which speech is ‘a way literally to en-chant the land – to sing it back into being, and to sing one’s being back into it’. Robert Macfarlane, ‘A Counter-Desecration Phrasebook’, in Towards Re-enchantment: Place and its Meanings, ed. by Gareth Evans and Di Robson (London: Artevents, 2010), pp.107–130 (p.114).
Kathleen Jamie, ‘Pathologies: A Startling Tour of Our Bodies’, in Granta: The New Nature Writing, 102 (2008), 35–50.
Ken Worpole, ‘East of Eden’, in Towards Re-enchantment: Place and its Meanings, ed. by Gareth Evans and Di Robson (London: Artevents, 2010), pp.61–81 (p.65).
Paul Farley and Michael Symmons Roberts, Edgelands: Journeys into England’s True Wilderness (London: Jonathan Cape, 2011).
Derived from the Greek “chora”, place or country, as opposed to “geo”, earth. See Stan Mendyk, ‘Early British Chorography’, The Sixteenth Century Journal, 17 (1986), 459–481.
Anne Lake Prescott, ‘Marginal Discourse: Drayton’s Muse and Selden’s ‘Story’’, Studies in Philology, 88 (1991), 307–328 (p.308).
I take the term ‘topographical-historical’ from Stan Mendyk, although when I apply it to modern and contemporary writing there is necessarily a stretching of what its constituent terms comprehend. See Mendyk, ‘Early British Chorography’, and Stan Mendyk, ‘Speculum Britanniae’: Regional Study, Antiquarianism, and Science in Britain to 1700 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1989), pp.21–24.
Vernon Lee, The Golden Keys and Other Essays on the Genius Loci (London: The Bodley Head, 1925), p.x.
Vernon Lee, Genius Loci: Notes on Places (London: Grant Richards, 1899), p.5.
Ian Davidson’s Ideas of Space in Contemporary Poetry (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007)
and Andrew Thacker’s Moving Through Modernity: Space and Geography in Modernism (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003) have both applied a range of spatial theorists to contemporary and modernist writers.
Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. by Stephen Rendall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), p.128.
This idea of a triple tension is derived from Janet Wolff and Iain Biggs, who have both suggested that the essay should be pulled, as Biggs describes Wolff’s approach, ‘between three frames of reference: the autobiographical, the concrete and particular instance, and the theoretical or abstract’. See Iain Biggs, ‘Essaying Place: Landscape, Music, and Memory (after Janet Wolff)’, in Process: Landscape and Text, ed. by Catherine Brace and Adeline Johns-Putra (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2010), pp.149–171 (p.155),
and Janet Wolff, Resident Alien: Feminist Cultural Criticism (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1995).
Denis Cosgrove, Social Formation and Symbolic Landscape (Beckenham: Croom Helm, 1984);
Landscape and Power, ed. by W.J.T. Mitchell (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994).
Carl Sauer, ‘The Morphology of Landscape’, in Land and Life: A Selection from the Writings of Carl Ortwin Sauer, ed. by John Leighly (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1963), pp.315–350 (p.316) (first pub. in University of California Publications in Geography, 2 (1925), 19–54).
This etymological relationship is advanced by Kenneth Olwig, ‘Sexual Cosmology: Nation and Landscape at the Conceptual Interstices of Nature and Culture; or, What Does Landscape Really Mean?’, in Landscape: Politics and Perspectives, ed. by Barbara Bender (Oxford: Berg, 1993), pp.307–343 (p.310).
Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973), p.120.
Christopher Tilley, ‘Metaphor, Materiality and Interpretation’, in The Material Culture Reader, ed. by Victor Buchli (Oxford: Berg, 2002), pp.23–26 (p.25).
Andreas Huyssen, ‘Authentic Ruins: Products of Modernity’, in Ruins of Modernity, ed. by Julia Hell and Andreas Schönle (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), pp.17–28 (p.25).
Bruno Reudenbach, Giovanni Battista Piranesi: Architektur als Bild (Munich: Prestel, 1979), p.44, trans. by and cited in Huyssen, ‘Authentic Ruins’, p.25.
Bruno Latour, ‘Why Has Critique Run out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern’, Critical Inquiry, 30 (2004), 225–248.
Indeed the volume Modernism on Sea: Art and Culture at the British Seaside, ed. by Lara Feigel and Alexandra Harris (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2009) contributes to the latter proposition.
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© 2014 James Wilkes
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Wilkes, J. (2014). Introduction. In: A Fractured Landscape of Modernity. Language, Discourse, Society. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137287083_1
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