This edited collection offers an in-depth exploration of the role of landscape and place as literary ‘settings’. It examines the multifaceted relationships between authors, narrators, and characters to their locales, as well as broader considerations of the significance of the representation of landscape in a world deeply affected by human interventions. Consisting of case studies of projects that engage with these questions, as well as research examining the theoretical underpinnings of both creative practices/processes and post-textual analysis of published works, this volume is both multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary in scope. In the context of the climate crisis and a pandemic which has caused us to re-evaluate the significance of landscape and the environment, it responds to the need to engage current trends within the academy and in broader social debate about our relationship to the natural world.
Foreword Graeme Harper.- 1 Introduction Craig Jordan-Baker and
Philippa Holloway.- Part I: Researching and Writing Landscape.- 2 Walking and
Making: A Collaborative Autoethnography of our Creative Recoveries Chris
Reading and Jess Moriarty.- 3 Walking In Circles: Getting There, Somewhere,
Nowhere Jenn Ashworth.- 4 Myth-Making and the Urban: Alienation, Folklore
and Re-Enchanting the Land Jon Mason.- 5 Looped: Visually Mapping the
Stories of the Past Framed by Experiences of the Present Barbara
Chamberlin.- Part II: Ecocriticism, Psychogeography and Creative Writing.- 6
Disturbing the Weather: Women Outdoors Moy McCrory.- 7 Psychogeography of
the Six Towns: Lyric Cartographies of Stoke on Trent Mark Brown and Maria
J. Martinez Sanchez.- 8 Micro Econarratives: Foraged Poems and Botanical
Forms Lisa Mansell.- Part III: Figures in the Landscape: Character, Place
and Context.- 9 Oneiric Spaces: Diaspora, Disappointment and the Locus
Amoenus Craig Jordan-Baker.- 10 Zonesof Alienation: Placing Roadside Picnic
and Stalker in the Chernobyl Zone Nick Rush-Cooper.- 11 Character and Place
in Alice and North Anne Caldwell.- Part IV: Writing in the Anthropocene
and Beyond.- 12 Jon McGregors Reservoir 13: The Posthuman Pastoral in the
Contemporary British Novel Jon McGregor.- 13 The Sand Library: Multispecies
Storymaking in Morecambe Bay Claire Dean.- 14 Then, Now, Forever?
Researching and Writing Nuclear Landscapes for The Half-Life of Snails
Philippa Holloway.- 15 A Terrible Beauty, or We Are All Ecopoets Now
Katherine Coles.
Philippa Holloway is a novelist and Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at Staffordshire University, UK. As a writer and academic her work is published in internationally, and she has curated international writing projects and collaborated on interdisciplinary projects related to energy production and nuclearity.
Craig Jordan-Baker is Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at the University of Brighton, UK. He is principally a writer of fiction and non-fiction writer and has published peer-reviewed research in a range of creative writing journals. He is also a dramatist, short story writer, arts journalist, walker and forager.