Literary Landscapes Of The British Isles

Identifies geographic locations mentioned in the works of English authors and discusses the influence locations may have had on their work.

An English professor makes the journey of a lifetime--searching to travel through the eyes of British and Irish writers, to see the landscapes that inspired them, to follow in the footsteps of their heroes and heroines, to combine two great loves--travel and literature. Her travels in 1980 took her to Ireland where she followed Leopold Bloom's wanderings around Dublin in Joyce's Ulysses; then to Scotland where she entered the world of Stevenson's Kidnapped and followed David Balfour's path back to Edinburgh from Mull; and to Dorset where she sought to discover the route and live in the same type of lodgings similar to those of Tess of the Durbervilles in Hardy's eponymous novel. Along the way she visited other beloved writers in their settings--the Brontes in Yorkshire, Wordsworth in the Lake District, Byron in Nottinghamshire, George Eliot in Coventry, Shakespeare in Stratford, Jane Austen in Bath (Northanger Abbey) to discover the inspirational settings of their works. Along the way she is drawn into the life around her and finds herself with one foot in the past and the other in the present. She recaptures and records her adventures and reactions in this memoir.

Beyond its housing estates and identikit high streets there is another Britain. This is the Britain of mist-drenched forests and unpredictable sea-frets: of wraith-like fog banks, druidic mistletoe and peculiar creatures that lurk, half-unseen, in the undergrowth, tantalising and teasing just at the periphery of human vision. How have the remarkably persistent folkloric traditions of the British Isles formed and been formed by the psyches of those who inhabit them? In this sparkling new history, Carolyne Larrington explores the diverse ways in which a myriad of fantastical beings has moulded the nation's cultural history. Fairies, elves and goblins here tread purposefully, sometimes malignly, over an eerie landscape that also conceals brownies, selkies, trows, knockers, boggarts, land-wights, Jack o'Lanterns, Barguests, the sinister Nuckleavee and Black Shuck: terrifying hell-hound of the Norfolk coast with eyes of burning coal. Ranging from Shetland to Jersey and from Ireland to East Anglia, while evoking the Wild Hunt, the ghostly bells of Lyonesse and the dread fenlands haunted by Grendel, this is a book that will captivate all those who long for the wild places: the mountains and chasms where giants lie in wait

This book is an interdisciplinary exploration of literary tourism’s role in shaping how locations in the British and Irish Isles have been seen, narrated, and valued. It explores the consequences of fictional constructions for the history, economics, and cultural politics of place, and for the Britain internalized in the mind’s eye.

This book explores the power of the map in fiction and its centrality to meaning, from Treasure Island to Winnie-the-Pooh.