On the Move: Mobility in the Modern Western World

Alexandra Harris on 03/11/2020

On the Move by Tim Cresswell

Tim Cresswell (London: Routledge, 2006)

On the Move by Tim CresswellRecommended by Fariha Shaikh

Cresswell’s On the Move was pivotal in giving me a theoretical foundation for what we mean by ‘place’ within the modern world. As a geographer, Cresswell’s careful examination of ‘place’, as the construction of locality, as opposed to ‘space’, as the product of mobility, has been useful for me in thinking through the ways in which the texts that I work with are always mediating a careful balance between the two. This is a useful starting point for anyone who is looking to gain a theoretical background of the concept of place.

Frankenstein (1818)

Alexandra Harris on 03/11/2020

Cover of Mary Shelley - Frankenstein

Mary Shelley ed. Marilyn Butler (Oxford, 1993)

Mary Shelley, FrankensteinRecommended by Jimmy Packham

Mary Shelley’s ubiquitous novel might seem like an obvious choice: “not this one again!” But I want to use this novel to gesture towards what I think is one of the most exciting – and what I believe is currently one of the most urgent – strands of landscape and environmental thinking: the ecogothic. Frankenstein straddles the Romantic and gothic traditions, and nowhere more so than in its portrait of the various (the myriad!) landscapes through which Victor and his creation travel. As a representative ecogothic text, the novel departs from the vision of nature generally associated with conventional Romanticism, and asks us to see nature as strange and estranging, unfamiliar and disquieting. More than this, however, this is a book that wants us to think ethically about our engagement with the natural world: the creature (himself a horrifying amalgam of nature and culture) works hard to establish a compassionate ethics, rooted in his experiences of nature and animal life. Frankenstein also reminds us how natural the apparently unnatural monsters that haunt our horror stories truly are: from The Odyssey and Beowulf, through Frankenstein, to more recent fare like Jeff Vandermeer’s Annihilation (2014) and the Godzilla franchise (1954-present). Indeed, in Godzilla I think we have a contemporary creature that rivals Frankenstein’s monster as the most compelling modern myth to illuminate humanity’s ambivalent relationship with the natural world: Godzilla returns to us at moments of ecological and global crisis, to restore a kind of harmony to the natural world, but does so while wreaking terrible destruction on human civilisation.

The Country of the Pointed Firs (1896)

Alexandra Harris on 03/11/2020

Sarah Orne Jewett, The Country of the Pointed Firs

Sarah Orne Jewett ed. Alison Easton (London, 1995)

Sarah Orne Jewett, The Country of the Pointed FirsRecommended by Jimmy Packham

Poised on the very edge of the land, the quiet and dilapidated coastal village of Dunnet Landing, Maine and its surrounding geography is the real protagonist at the heart of Sarah Orne Jewett’s collection of sketches – a masterpiece of what has been called “local colour writing”, so-called for the genre’s unassuming but perceptive attention to a very particular locale. I love these brief sketches for the portraits they paint of eccentric townsfolk, the goings-on of their small, out-of-the-way community, the unshowy but knowledgeable relationship between humans and the natural world (such as the tales’ herb woman, Almira Todd); at times, these tales teeter on the allegorical or the mythic, and celebrate the power of storytelling, especially female storytelling, in keeping a community and its histories alive. But we make a mistake, I think, in taking these romantic, nostalgic sketches of a town seemingly out-of-kilter with the chaos and energy of the modern world wholly at face value. There are darker and more radical undercurrents eddying in these waters. The legacy of New England’s profound gothic tradition impinges on Jewett’s world, in the witch-like figure of Almira Todd, for instance. The relationship between women and the landscape looks ahead to the more overtly queer landscape writing of another writer of the US’s eastern seaboard, the poet H.D; and the intertwining here of the paean to a fast-passing way of life and the cosmic resonance of this observation finds its successor in a poem like Elizabeth Bishop’s ‘At the Fishhouses’.

The Poetry of Clare, Hopkins, Thomas, and Gurney: Lyric Individualism

Alexandra Harris on 03/11/2020

Andrew Hodgson, The Poetry of Clare, Hopkins, Thomas, and Gurney: Lyric Individualism

Andrew Hodgson (Basingstoke, 2020)

Andrew Hodgson, The Poetry of Clare, Hopkins, Thomas, and Gurney: Lyric IndividualismRecommended by Jessica Fay

This book will be of interest to anyone who enjoys attending closely to the intricate methods poets use to express what they perceive and how they perceive it. We all see the world in different ways, observing different things, and our sense of identity and sense of home is channelled through those unique experiences. Subjective encounters with specific places, local events, and minute aspects of nature are at the centre of Romantic poetics. But while the aim of Wordsworth’s self-consciousness, for example, is to discover and communicate universal truths, this book shows—through a series of close readings—how four poets struggled with and against language, syntax, and form to achieve extreme lyric integrity, communicating the singularity of their embodied perception of the world for its own sake. Clare, Hopkins, Thomas, and Gurney emerge as proponents of a newly isolated and intricately defined poetic style that will nuance thinking about the spectrum of approaches to lyric subjectivity traceable within the Romantic tradition.

The White Doe of Rylstone: Or, The Fate of the Nortons (1815)

Alexandra Harris on 03/11/2020

The White Doe of Rylstone: Or, The Fate of the Nortons (1815) by William Wordsworth

William Wordsworth ed. Kristine Dugas (Ithaca and London, 1988)

The White Doe of Rylstone: Or, The Fate of the Nortons (1815) by William WordsworthRecommended by Jessica Fay

This narrative poem was written by Wordsworth in 1807 but withheld from the press until 1815 because of fears it wouldn’t be well received. And it wasn’t. It’s an austere poem that tricks the reader into expecting an exciting romance narrative of the kind at which Walter Scott excelled, only to disappoint those expectations when nothing much happens. It tells the story of the Norton family during the Rising of the North, a Roman Catholic rebellion aimed at dethroning Elizabeth I, but Wordsworth refuses to describe combat scenes and the most violent act performed by the rebels comprises treading on a Bible and saying Mass. Instead, the emphasis is on Norton’s Protestant daughter, Emily, who waits in the medieval garden at Rylstone Hall to hear news that her father and brothers have been killed. In her grief, Emily is comforted by the companionship of a milk-white doe, which continues to visit her grave in the churchyard at Bolton Abbey for many years afterwards. The garden and the churchyard are presented by Wordsworth as places enriched by the fact that they have witnessed centuries of human pain—from the medieval period through to the early nineteenth century—but for that reason, these are also places enriched by hope. This little-read Wordsworth poem gets to the root of his thinking about the consolation that can be gained from quietude, openness to lessons of sympathy from the animal world, and deep connections between people and the places in which they suffer and overcome that suffering.

The Idea of Landscape and the Sense of Place, 1730–1840

Alexandra Harris on 03/11/2020

John Barrell, The Idea of Landscape and the Sense of Place, 1730–1840 (Cambridge, 1972)

John Barrell (Cambridge, 1972)

John Barrell, The Idea of Landscape and the Sense of Place, 1730–1840 (Cambridge, 1972)Recommended by Jessica Fay

This book gives a lot. It taught me how to recognize and describe the compositional patterns of seventeenth-century landscape painting (which were epitomized in the work of Claude Lorrain), how these patterns became standardized in English landscape art, and how, in turn, they inflected the structures of eighteenth-century topographical poetry. Barrell’s close reading, showing how the syntax of James Thomson’s The Seasons encourages the reader’s eye to move across the page in the way that the eye surveys a landscape painting, reveals how eighteenth-century readers looked at real landscapes. This builds to a foundational study of John Clare’s unique poetic representation of place.

 

Zara Castagna

Alexandra Harris on 21/10/2020


Zara Castagna

PhD student in English Literature


zxc816@student.bham.ac.uk

    My research focuses on Dorothy Wordsworth and her circle, approximately from 1787 to 1830. I have wider interests in Romantic period writing and initially encountered Dorothy’s work through her particular way of describing landscapes and her use of the picturesque. Being also interested in life-writing, I now focus Dorothy’s letters, specifically on the way she uses the letter to draw people from different places together and maintain friendships across large distances. I want to explore how these primarily epistolary relationships influenced and shaped Dorothy’s perception of place and that, in turn, her other writings.

    Hattie Walters

    Alexandra Harris on 17/10/2020

    Hattie Walters

    PhD Candidate, Department of English Literature, University of Birmingham

    hxw368@student.bham.ac.uk

      My work discusses interactions between the garden and literary and visual cultures in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, with an emphasis on the materialisation of lived and local histories through garden work.

      From Gertrude Jekyll, Mary Watts, and Ford Madox Ford, to the Sitwells, Dora Carrington, Sylvia Townsend Warner, and Vita Sackville-West, I am fascinated by how an individual’s gardening influences (and interferes) with their artistic practices—and how they engage with an artistically mediated understanding of rural countryside.

      I look to unpick how gardens, broadly defined, can be exploited not just as an inseparable stimulus for a figure’s art but molded to provide a personal interrogation into history, frequently one localised and set on invigorating an ideal of the rural working class. The study of modern garden cultures enables the isolation and examination of the material interventions of artistic cultures into rural life, from the reclamation of historic houses, to the beautification of derelict cottages, and the cultivation of horticultural “quaintness”, or a pre-existing sense of “charm”.

      I am particularly interested in tracking a personal kind of garden history: revelations amongst runner beans, for instance, or biographically endowed potato plants; the design of terracotta pots in a declaration of family heritage; formative readings in orchards; or queer country cottage retreats.

      Bethan Roberts

      Alexandra Harris on 13/09/2020

      Bethan Roberts
      Bethan Roberts

      Bethan Roberts

      William Noble Postdoctoral Research Fellow, University of Liverpool

      My first book: Charlotte Smith and the Sonnet: Place, Form and Tradition in the Late Eighteenth Century (Liverpool University Press, 2019) offers the first full-length study of Smith’s influential Elegiac Sonnets and clarifies its ‘place’ – in multiple ways – in literary history as a work celebrated for ‘making it new’, yet deeply engaged with the literary past. It argues that Smith’s sense of literary tradition is inscribed in the subjects of her poems, and that the literary associations of the places, settings, flora and fauna of her sonnets – across the River Arun, the sea, plants and flowers – are a constitutive aspect of them. It is interested in and reveals the complex processes underpinning Smith’s reception and paradoxical position from the late eighteenth century to the present day, and shows that the appropriation of place itself was an important way in which aspects of literary tradition have been negotiated and understood by Smith, her predecessors, contemporaries and successors. My second book is Nightingale for the Reaktion Press Animal series (forthcoming, 2021) and my current research is on Romantic ornithology; and on the literary and natural history of the River Mersey.

      Catriona Paton

      Alexandra Harris on 13/09/2020

      Katie Paton
      Catriona Paton

      Catriona Paton

      Doctoral researcher in English Literature, University of Birmingham

      CXP311@student.bham.ac.uk

        My PhD project, funded by the AHRC Midlands4Cities Doctoral Training Partnership, examines how nineteenth-century poets and essayists linked social equality and the countryside, exploring the relevance for today’s socioenvironmental concerns. The modern political, economic landscape and the Anthropocene (era defined by humanity’s impact on nature) was largely forged in the period from about 1750 to 1914: open fields were enclosed by hedges, rural labourers migrated to cities, and ideologies of individualism and progress replaced communal rights. From the poetry of John Clare to the campaign articles of Octavia Hill (co-founder of the National Trust), nineteenth-century writing provides unique access into human reactions towards rapidly changing social and human-nature relations with industrialisation.

        My interdisciplinary work explores how parks, commons, gardens and countryside footpaths are vitally important now as in the nineteenth century because of their potential to connect people with each other and the environment. More broadly, I am interested in the public value of the humanities, the way human culture and community is bound up with the environment, and the importance of sociocultural history in environmental education and conversations on human-nature relations.