Deconstructing the map in late twentieth century British poetry

Masters thesis

Enfolding landscapes: Shell guides and the mapping of Britain

Masters bibliography paper

'Lay now the cornerstone': Wordsworth and the mapping of experience

Masters paper

Novel geographies of the Great North Road in C. E. Montague's 'Right Off the Map' (1927) and Elizabeth Bowen's 'To the North' (1932)

Paper given at Utopian Spaces of British Literature and Culture, 1890-1945: Oxford, 18th September 2009

Frederick Jameson has referred to the Great North Road in Forster’s Howards End (1910) as ‘a figuration of the forcefield of the modern’. This paper will consider literary presentations of the impact of the GNR as geographical anomaly. The primary focus will be after the decline of the railway (1927 -), when the first new bypasses and roadside landscape advisory committees ensured the modernity of the GNR driving experience, anticipating the motorway in form. The inadequate adjustments of mapping to a British landscape re-shaped by this adapted road structure leads to surreal portrayals of the GNR in C. E. Montague’s Right Off the Map (1927) and Elizabeth Bowen’s To the North (1932).

This paper will demonstrate how these two texts consider the novelty of the new speeding highway to the North as a means by which to break away from institutionalised or habitual structures of space. Right Off the Map performs this within a fantasy, Utopian landscape of Britain; To the North presents the GNR as morphed with the foreign, purer North of ‘unbreathed air’ beyond Britain.  I will use the extensive focus on the GNR in both of these texts to show how  important geographical novelty is to literary explorations of Britain,  particularly the initial impressions of geographical ‘dislocation’ or ‘liberation’ during any important changes to human mobility within the landscape.

‘Whistling the bylaws as they piss’: rewriting regions in Andrew Crozier’s 'All Where Each Is' (1985), Peter Riley’s 'Noon Province' (1989) and Douglas Oliver’s 'An Island That is All the World' (1990)

Forthcoming collection from the conference Dialogues across Boundaries: Debating Local Cosmopolitanisms

This paper is about British poets who investigate the ways in which we identify, delineate and categorize patches of ground, landforms and landscape features. Close readings of sections of works by Oliver, Crozier and Riley will be used to show their diverse tactics in presenting the conflictual worlds of boundaries and contours. Developments in chorology are reflected, for instance, in Riley’s syntax: the conservative map is a record of bounded places, but indeterminate grammar and punctuation show instead the shifting, evasive nature of such horizons. Also spatial disjunction in Crozier, such as the alignment of margins, can be used to interrupt territorial parameters.
The paper will take as its focus such explicit experiments in the poetic representation of perceived boundaries in land, but it will also display how these feed into wider debates about negotiating local and cosmopolitan space. It will finish with a close reading of competing administrative, historical, and other boundaries in the ‘veiled and separated land’ of Crozier’s poem ‘On Romney Marsh’. I will point forward at this point to the most recent volumes included in my PhD thesis, such as Peter Riley’s A Map of Faring. Finally the paper will reject the idea of poetry dealing with entirely unbounded space, arguing instead for a discursive navigation of boundaries, according to Robert Crawford’s sense that ‘abstracted from boundaries poetry loses its soil’.

‘The landscape is riddled with failed promises / and premature returns’: industrial remains in Ted Hughes’ 'Remains of Elmet' (1979) and Peter Riley’s 'Tracks and Mineshafts' (1983)

To be given at the Reanimating Industrial Spaces session, Theories of Archaeology Group 2009, 17th-19th December, Durham http://www.dur.ac.uk/tag.2009/index.html

This paper compares the use of de-industrialised British landscapes by the poets Ted Hughes and Peter Riley. Ted Hughes’ Remains of Elmet is written about the Calder Valley, one-time ‘Cradle of the Industrial Revolution’ which, as he states in his foreword, was – after the collapse of industrial operations – characterised by its ‘architecture of … desolation’ and ‘grim beauty’. Peter Riley’s Tracks and Mineshafts is the result of his nine years of documentation of the history of lead mining in the Peak District, combining research in reference libraries, and, as he later remembered, ‘tramp(ing) all over the area for several years in order to locate and contemplate holes in the ground’. Brief reference will be made also to Riley’s investigations into the quarries of Derbyshire in Lines on the Liver (1981) and Sea Watches (1991), both forerunners to his more explicitly archaeological sequence Excavations (2004).

Using close readings of the poems, and extra-textual evidence such as footnotes and letters, this paper aims to show the ways in which the two poetic projects approach their respective landscapes. It will particularly focus on the linguistic means by which a poet may look ‘beyond the surface’ of the landscape and display further sediments of meaning. It will finally ask how and why the topographical residues of industry may be manipulated and re-animated in the poetic form.