Writing Britain: Wastelands to Wonderlands

Writing Britain celebrates some of the most dazzling treasures of English literature, showcasing how Britain’s greatest authors have been inspired by, and have even redefined, their country. From Chaucer’s pilgrims journeying from Southwark to Canterbury, to the twenty-first-century suburban hinterlands of J. G. Ballard, this book explores how the places and landscapes of Britain permeate the nation’s great literary works and how these works have, in turn, helped shape our perception and understanding of landscape and place, both real and imagined.

 

In addition to celebrating the traditional British landscape, the book also examines the literary construction of the city, following the mysterious fog-filled streets that stretch from the London of Dickens and Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde to the urban underworlds revealed by contemporary writers such as Neil Gaiman and Iain Sinclair. Featuring such diverse landscapes as Emily Brontë’s wild and windy Yorkshire Moors, Wordsworth’s Lake District, Elizabeth Gaskell’s industrial northern towns, the seaside turned nightmare of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Graham Greene’s seedy and menacing Brighton, Virginia Woolf’s Bond Street, and Hanif Kureishi’s suburbia, Writing Britain describes and illustrates the work of over one hundred of the greatest British writers who have been inspired by place, spanning the Middle Ages to the twenty-first century.