Alexandra Harris – Page 4

Difficult Paradises

Alexandra Harris on 22/11/2020

For our ‘Monday Conversation’ on 26th October 2020, we welcomed Tim Dee, Michael Malay, and Liam Olds.

Stranger, turn back again, frustrate and vexed:
This land, cut off, will not communicate …
(W.H. Auden, The Watershed)

In our newsletter, Michael Malay (English, University of Bristol) wrote about natural renewal on the sites of coal spoils and wondered about the role of writers in responding to such ‘difficult paradises’. To pursue these questions, Michael was joined online by entomologist Liam Olds (founder of the Colliery Spoil Biodiversity Initiative) and by Tim Dee, widely considered one of our greatest living nature writers. Tim’s book Landfill is (in the words of Helen Macdonald) ‘a deep meditation on difficulty and waste, on the beauty of the disregarded, and on what we make of matter out of place’.

In this decayed hole among the mountains
In the faint moonlight, the grass is singing…
(T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land)

Hannah Christopher

Alexandra Harris on 21/11/2020

Hannah Christopher

Alumna, BA English Literature, University of Birmingham

HFC009@alumni.bham.ac.uk

I am interested in the ways in which personal experiences in local places are microcosms of universal human experience. The early nineteenth-century writer Thomas Noble touches on this in the preface to his 1808 poem Blackheath, anticipating that readers will think his subject ‘entirely local’ and therefore not of interest to ‘the public in general’. Yet, he writes, ‘my subject is not local; it is as pervasive as Nature’. Less than three miles away from where Noble found his muse in the environs of Blackheath is an unnamed scrap of common ground which has always been known to me as The Place. The term ‘place’ will conjure up different environments in every mind, but in suburban London, my brother and I ascribed the term to this open wild field, unique in its position overlooking the city. It sits above the snaking maze of textured concrete, painted walls and brown brick. It satisfied my sense of what Constance Padwick, editor of the diaries of Victorian painter and missionary Lilias Trotter, describes as ‘space hunger’; a yearning and dreaming for the skyline beyond the ‘man-stifled town’. Landscapes have the power to fill us with an almost physical sense of awe, something well established in research about Wordsworth and his contemporaries, but which seems equally important in the recent boom in nature writing in the twenty-first century, amid an urban and digital environment.

I am also interested in how place informs literary creation, and how literary creation then informs place again. I planned a poetry guided walk around Winterbourne Gardens and was involved in the curation and running of the Canal and River Trust’s first floating exhibition entitled Journeys. The exhibition reframed the industrial story of the Birmingham canals, uncovering personal, hidden histories of canals as places of art, recreation, community and wellbeing.

I am currently working on a group of poems provisionally titled Reflections of Glory engaging with local place as a source of parable which points the created to the creator.

Michael Malay

Alexandra Harris on 18/11/2020

Michael Malay

Lecturer in English Literature and the Environmental Humanities at the University of Bristol.

Michael’s current project is about four creatures – eels, moths, freshwater mussels and crickets – that are disappearing from Britain, and about the people who love and care for them.

The project takes the view that animals are not only present in places, but co-creators of a place’s presence, and that, as these world-making beings disappear, the human imagination is altered as much as physical landscapes are.

Alongside this narrative of loss, however, the project is also about the hope and wonder these animals can inspire in us and about their capacity to flourish again in damaged or neglected places.

The book is provisionally entitled Late Light and a section from the ‘eel’ chapter can be read online at The Willow Herb Review.

Tom Roberts

Alexandra Harris on 17/11/2020

Tom Roberts

DPhil Candidate, University of Oxford and part of the TIDE project: Travel, Transculturality and Idenitity in England, c.1550-1700

tom.roberts@ell.ox.ac.uk

TIDE

My research looks at England’s interaction with the Italian commedia dell’arte during the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, and how the form manifested in the cultural imagination of early modern London when the surviving evidence suggests limited contact.

I also work on human migration to sixteenth-century London and the small population of Italian merchants, scholars, and liberal artisans residing in the City’s eastern wards. I am particularly interested in how these migrants navigated their new environment, importing certain spatial practices and remodelling them to the specifications of the material city.

Thomas Kaye

Alexandra Harris on 17/11/2020

Thomas Kaye

PhD Student (Leverhulme Trust Doctoral Scholar), Department of English and Forest Edge, BIFoR.
txk006@student.bham.ac.uk

Forest Edge

My research delves into the woodlands and forests of contemporary fiction where these ancient biotic spaces radiate with warping pressure. I am especially interested in how modern authors reimagine mythic and folkloric roots, twisting them into contemporary tales that lead to the blending of the human and the more-than-human through contact with trees. I am developing a thesis that examines the affect of trees, how they metamorphose both the human and the text – I am exploring this symbiosis as an imaginative rewilding.

Currently I am researching our often imperceptible, yet ever present, reciprocal respiration with trees. The dual meaning of respire – to breathe and to recover – lends itself to a discussion of texts that confound vegetal and bodily processes all the while engaging in a recovery. To select texts that are themselves a form of renewal makes them analogous to the woodland space they engage with and create – for woods are self-renewing. I hypothesise that forests and woodlands respire in our art. They aid the recovery and retelling of tales that in return provide a respite for our rapidly depleted woodlands.

My research covers the writings of Richard Powers, Annie Proulx, Daisy Johnson, and Sarah Hall. I also hope to engage with sculpture, particularly the work of David Nash.

On the Making of Gardens (first published 1909)

Alexandra Harris on 03/11/2020

George Reresby Sitwell (1951, Charles Scribner’s & Sons)

Recommended by Hattie Walters

In the first decade of the twentieth century, Sir George Reresby Sitwell could frequently be found in analytic concentration within great Italian gardens, making meditative notes that would form a large part of On the Making of Gardens—his personal design treatise. It is a curious text, devoid of plants—made up instead as part rhapsodic commentary on derelict garden architecture, part summary of garden historical progression, part examination of the effects of the Renaissance garden, part rules for good design—and was painstakingly constructed in his attempt to revitalise the modern English garden. Initially, his endeavours had limited success (Sir George blamed the book cover design), and yet his text provides an intriguing insight into his planning of the gardens at Renishaw Hall, Derbyshire; his particular understanding of Renaissance formalisms, and his tantalising descriptions of old gardens in states of solitude inaccessible to the modern visitor.

Old West Surrey: Some Notes and Memories (first published 1904)

Alexandra Harris on 03/11/2020

Old West Surrey: Some Notes and Memories - Gertrude Jekyll

Gertrude Jekyll (1999, The History Press Ltd)

Recommended by Hattie Walters

Unlike Gertrude Jekyll’s numerous other “garden books”, which are predominately dedicated to the planning and maintenance of a garden over the year, Old West Surrey was intended to memorialise the elements of rural working-class life that she saw rapidly disappearing from her beloved late nineteenth-century stomping-grounds. Roving from the architectural features of specific properties to characters remembered from childhood church sermons, fragments of dialect, dress, custom, and house ornament; and peppered with her own photographs and illustrations, Jekyll’s text is devoted to recording her impressions of local culture, used to promote her own Arts and Crafts sensitivity to place. This work is an important example of the twentieth-century reclamation of the distinctiveness of local village life, and Jekyll’s prime concern is the countryside included in her personal definition of Old West Surrey.

Common Land in English Painting, 1700-1850

Alexandra Harris on 03/11/2020

Ian Waites (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2012)

Recommended by Catriona Paton

Examining how artists such as Peter DeWint and John Constable depicted common land during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Waites sketches a picture of a little-known, unenclosed landscape from England’s past. While enclosures had been impacting the countryside since the fifteenth century, this book charts a period of fast-paced parliamentary enclosure activity in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries which transformed many remaining common field systems. Waites examines cultural artistic developments, such as the Picturesque, Naturalism and rural nostalgia, alongside socioeconomic debates surrounding parliamentary enclosures, including ideologies of improvement and the independence of the commoner. Studying the landscape art, literature and contemporary commentary of the period c.1700-1850, this book makes a strong case for the importance of common land in English landscape painting, wider culture and history.

David Cox, The Cross Roads, 1850, oil on panel, Birmingham Museums Trust

Image: public domain.

David Cox, The Cross Roads, oil on panel, 1850, Birmingham Museums and Art Galleries.

David Cox’s (1783-1859) atmospheric painting of an unspecified location is one of a number of artworks analysed by Waites in his chapter on English Naturalism. In a scene dominated by tempestuous sky and an unbounded expanse of apparently common land, figures and their animals trudge onwards into the wind guided by a time-worn signpost. As Waites highlights, Cox memorialised an open, common field landscape becoming increasingly rare with parliamentary enclosures during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Storied Ground: Landscape and the Shaping of English National Identity

Alexandra Harris on 03/11/2020

Paul Readman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018)

Recommended by Catriona Paton

From the cliffs of Dover to the industrial city of Manchester, Readman highlights the significance of connections between landscape and heritage in the construction of a modern, popular form of English national identity. This work explores how landscapes are ‘storied’ with countless human histories and memories bound up with place. Through the history, literature and art of the late eighteenth to the early twentieth centuries, Storied Ground traces a varied and widespread engagement with landscapes in English culture. Expanding a marginal, conservative and anti-modern understanding of rural Englishness, Readman demonstrates how a ‘topography’ of English national identity accommodated industrial landscapes and diverse political perspectives in a rapidly urbanising and democratising modern Britain.

Our Common Land and Other Short Essays (1877)

Alexandra Harris on 03/11/2020

Octavia Hill (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011)

Recommended by Catriona Paton

Octavia Hill was a housing reformer, active campaigner for open space preservation, and co-founder of the National Trust. This collection of Hill’s public-facing lectures and articles covers topics ranging from her principles on charity to commons preservation, largely stemming from her housing work in London’s poor neighbourhoods. In her papers on open spaces, Hill described how paths and commons were being closed to the public, just as people increasingly depended on open space in the context of a rising urban population. The collection captures a crucial period in the history of public access to green spaces, and can be read in the context of a broader open space preservation movement which led to the establishment of the National Trust in 1895.

Hill’s papers combined legal, political acumen and practicality with a humanity and appreciation for the value of beauty, leisure and rest in people’s lives. While some of Hill’s approach was of its time, a spirit of commonality nonetheless permeates her work; green, open spaces were for Hill a common possession of rich and poor alike. She urgently called on public and parliamentary opinion to protect commons from enclosure and provide accessible green space in cities, for the health and soul of present and future generations.