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

By discussing the work of Thomas Hardy, Richard Jefferies, John Cowper Powys and Mary Butts, <em>Mapping the Wessex Novel </em>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. <br><br>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.