Reading Place Writing: Geography, Form, Immersion, 2010?2020

Ebook available to libraries exclusively as part of the JSTOR Path to Open initiative.

Creative non-fiction books about place became increasingly prominent in British and Irish literary culture during the 2010s. More particularly, a wide range of writers, exploring a diverse range of landscapes, focused on the local and the everyday in examining what Robert Macfarlane has described as ‘the undiscovered country of the nearby’. This literary geographical monograph is the first book-length study of such works of place writing and offers detailed readings of key texts by, amongst others, Elizabeth-Jane Burnett, Rachel Lichtenstein, Amy Liptrot, Iain Sinclair, Richard Skelton, and Jean Sprackland. Many of these place writing books have been described as immersive works of literature but, to date, the precise meaning of that term has remained unexamined. How, then, do a range of creative non-fiction texts from the 2010s function as works of immersive place writing? By extension, how do such creative non-fiction texts – rooted, as they are, in the articulation of actual geographical experience – complicate the understanding of what it means for a reader to be imaginatively immersed in a literary work? Reading Place Writing explores these critical questions through an interdisciplinary enlacing of geographical thought, cognitive linguistics, narrative theory, and a series of creative-critical reflections.

David Cooper is Senior Lecturer in English at Manchester Metropolitan University where he is the founding co-director of the Centre for Place Writing.