Mapping the Wessex Novel: Landscape, History and the Parochial in British Literature, 1870-1940

This title considers four regional writers and their complex relationship with concepts of space and place at a time of seismic social change. By discussing the work of Thomas Hardy, Richard Jefferies, John Cowper Powys and Mary Butts, "Mapping the Wessex Novel" imaginatively maps and excavates various districts of the 'west country' so as radically to redefine the 'parochial'; while being keenly aware of their own status as natives locked into complex histories of self-exile and return, estrangement and ardent identification. Contributing to the growing research on space and place in Victorian and Modernist writing, Radford uses the analysis of these writers as a lens through which to inspect the relationship between rural periphery and metropolitan centre; contested ideologies of 'Englishness' and the form of the national past.