Book Reviews
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BOOK REVIEWS
Introduction
The productive dynamism of contemporary literary geography research will be reflected, in each
issue of the journal, by a Book Reviews section. The reviews in this inaugural issue draw attention to
the breadth of the journal’s spatial scope by moving from the geographical and imaginative
particularities of northern England, through the landscapes of ‘Gilded Age America’ and
contemporary Italy, and across the ‘metageographies’ of both modernism and post-modernism. En
route, the reviewers discuss critical writing which engages with a heterogeneous range of literary
texts in multiple forms and multiple genres and from multiple historical periods. Moreover, the
reviewers themselves form, in disciplinary terms, a heterogeneous group which includes
representatives from Sociology, Geography, English Literature, Comparative literature and Creative
Writing. The reviews in this first issue, then, highlight the pluralism which will be a defining
characteristic of Literary Geographies.
In keeping with this spirit of pluralism, we are keen – in future issues – to provide
opportunities for alternative and exploratory approaches to the scholarly practice of reviewing.
Forthcoming issues, then, will include longer review essays which critically engage with two or more
recent publications; alongside this, we will publish reviews by different authors – ideally from
disparate disciplinary backgrounds – on the same scholarly text. In addition, we will take advantage
of the flexibility afforded by digital space to publish reviews incorporating the use of different media
including, for example, photography and video.
Titles currently available for review will be advertised on the Literary Geographies website; but
please contact the Book Reviews Editor directly if you are willing to review a title (or titles) not
listed on the site. Similarly, we would welcome any innovative suggestions you may have for
alternative approaches to critical reviewing. Ultimately, our hope is that the Book Reviews section
will be as dynamic as the interdisciplinary field of research on which it will be focused.
David Cooper
Book Reviews Editor
Manchester Metropolitan University, UK
[email protected]
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Katherine Cockin (ed.) (2012) The Literary North. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan,
288pp., £56.00 (hardback), ISBN 9780230367401.
If judged by their representations in literature, there has been, and continues to be, something
troubling about northern English cities. In many literary accounts throughout the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries, cities in the North of England become places where social problems are spatially
demarcated and ripe for expert intervention. If this has been the representational fate of the
northern English city, Katharine Cockin’s edited collection offers examples which confirm, critique
and complicate such canonical renderings of northern urbanism. The Literary North includes chapters
on poetry, drama and discussion of significant non-fiction sources, with an occasional focus on rural
settings. The majority of contributions, however, concentrate on representations of urban life in
novels, with analyses of important portraits of Hull, Leeds, Nottingham, towns in the Potteries,
Salford, Teesside and Tyneside. The city of Manchester does not overwhelm the collection but does
figure prominently, as may be expected, given its status as ‘a synecdoche for industrialization’ since
the nineteenth century (1) and for which it has attracted moral censure for the attendant social ills.
Through its fictional portrayals, the industrial city of Manchester became not only a site of social
troubles but a troubling spatial form in itself. This is problematic, Josephine Guy argues in her
contribution, because the variegated economy and progressive political and cultural movements of
Victorian Manchester (and northern cities more generally) have become obscured because of the
efficacy of social problem novels by writers such as Elizabeth Gaskell. Plural political histories of
urban life have been muted through the persistence of Victorian tropes within literary portraits
throughout the twentieth century.
Against this, Claire Warden’s chapter on Ewan McColl’s play, Landscape with Chimneys (1949),
depicts the ambivalences the dramatist writes into his account of Salford and his recognition that,
notwithstanding their problems, cities might also be the spatial settings for purposeful and
progressive articulations of working class politics. ‘Which Side Are You On?’ is the song of class
unity which comes at the play’s finale, serving to identify Salford, and the northern city more
generally, as a site of oppositional culture. What it stands in opposition to signals one of the
animating themes throughout the collection: the relationship of the North to the South of England.
As sympathetically drawn as Gaskell’s portrait of Manchester was, for Guy it served to reassure a
Southern readership of the failure of Manchester’s middle classes to harness the factory system
equitably rather than point to the systemic contradictions of industrial capitalism per se. There is a
line of influence from Gaskell’s social problem novels to the social realist documentary forms of the
1930s, especially George Orwell’s The Road to Wigan Pier (1937). Orwell’s text comes at the highpoint
of an ethnographic moment and a strain of class tourism that Cockin identifies as colouring much
writing about the North ever since. And the reproduction of cultural stereotypes was not just the
consequence of Southern authors using northern English cities as diagnostic tools to explore wider
social issues. Nick Bentley’s chapter on the work of significant Northern writers in the late 1950s
identifies nostalgic tendencies entrenching clichés of community life perceived to be under threat
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from the emergent youth culture in these cities, most obviously in Richard Hoggart’s The Uses of
Literacy (1957).
The situation of the North as a place wherein loss is keenly experienced is a common theme
for other authors. For example, Jo Gill’s chapter offers a rich analysis of how Tony Harrison’s
choice of lyric conventions in Continuous (1981) works in a tensed way to act ‘as an elegy not just for
the self, the family and home but for a changing North’ (159). In her chapter on landscapes in
children’s novels, Tess Cosslett argues that the North acts as a liminal geography, situating and
shaping the development of characters into their adulthood. There are similar arguments about the
role of landscape in other chapters about children’s literature: Robert Lee’s discusses writers, such as
David Almond, who situate their stories amongst communities undergoing processes of cultural
change; whilst Nolan Dalrymple analyses Robert Westall’s work, in which the North-East of
England and its children ‘are always located at a point of tension between the traditions of the past
and the frightening uncertainties of the future’ (187). In Cosslett’s reading, the North can be a place
of danger in children’s literature; but precisely so in order to serve a pedagogic function, revealing
and then tempering the risks associated with the passage from one stage of the life-course into the
next.
The North is a particular kind of psycho-geography, with Cosslett suggesting that the northern
landscape might become a kind of ‘wise parent or guide, sending support and help, but not
interfering’ (211). This is an intriguing idea, prompting a consideration of the role of the Northern
Pennines in W.H. Auden’s writing. Tony Sharpe’s astute contribution identifies these mountains as
‘parabolic landscapes’ (110) and moral bases for Auden’s work. This does not connote the easy
moralizing short-hand that, for example, Manchester became through Victorian literature; rather, it
provides Auden with a morally ambiguous landscape which ‘was capable of changing in respect to
the imaginative, emotional and even theological uses he made of it’ (109). The collection concludes
with Cockin’s readings of contemporary northern fiction which, alongside Lynne Pearce’s review of
recent literary portrayals of Moss Side, plays with the realist conventions instrumental to
monochromatic space-myths of the northern cities as sites purely of social problems. Instead literary
approaches adopting the tactics and techniques of magic realism and cyberpunk open up northern
landscapes to possible re-appropriation and re-enchantment.
As Neal Alexander’s review of this collection suggests (2013), a wider geographical span would
have brought a fuller understanding of northernness. The collection has its roots in a 2006
conference at the University of Hull, and so the school of writers (such as Paul Farley, Michael
Symmons Roberts and Jean Sprackland) addressing northern settings in recent landscape writing
does not figure here. Nonetheless, this collection gathers a range of excellent contributions that, in
different ways, offer a re-balancing of our default recall of northern writing. Saliently, then, there is a
greater emphasis on Arnold Bennett’s Potteries (through chapters by Ann Heilmann and Ruth
Robbins) than Charles Dickens’s Coketown; a focus on representations of the North through voices
close to the locality (whether those reviewed by Jan Hewitt in her history of fiction in the late
Victorian press in the North East, or the treatments of Hull by Philip Larkin, Douglas Dunn and
Peter Didsbury in Sean O’Brien’s chapter); and a welcome consideration of children’s literature in
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three chapters. As a result, The Literary North will act as a benchmark by which to judge future
collections on the pluralities of northernness and their literary geographies.
Work Cited
Alexander, N. (2013) ‘Katherine Cockin (ed) The Literary North’. The Review of English Studies, 64(264),
pp. 360-362.
Daryl Martin
University of York, UK
[email protected]
Neal Alexander and James Moran (eds) (2013) Regional Modernisms. Edinburgh: Edinburgh
University Press, 248pp., £70.00 (hardback), ISBN 9780748669301.
‘Where did Modernism happen?’ ask Neal Alexander and James Moran in their introduction to this
collection, and the answer, revealed across ten illuminating chapters, is unexpectedly wide-ranging.
This study of modernist writing in the Britain and Ireland brings together many well-known figures,
as well as some unfamiliar names, whilst reassessing how ‘modernism’ is defined in terms, firstly, of
place, but also of identity, politics, ideology, aesthetics, technique and time period. As Alexander and
Moran explain, opening up the metropolitan borders of modernism also means stretching the
sometimes strict and arbitrary chronological boundaries that place modernism between the turn of
the twentieth century and the Second World War.
Clear definition of the potentially politicised terminology associated with ‘region’ is crucial to
this even-handed survey of work that occurred in, originated from or addressed, locales lying outside
the supposed centres of literary production. Terms like ‘region’, ‘regionalism’, ‘transnational’ and
‘glocalisation’ (the latter two appropriated from the language of global finance, but appearing
increasingly in literary studies) are adopted and interrogated over the course of the book; thus this is
a study that not only uses ‘region’ to investigate ‘modernism’, but uses modernism as a unifying
theme with which to explore the notion of the region.
Several of the essays develop new critical models for thinking about regional modernisms.
David James writes about Storm Jameson and Sylvia Townsend Warner, beginning with Jameson’s
account of taking a commercial flight: an ‘aerial perspective’ over Europe which contrasts with the
localised and detailed focus elsewhere in her work. James’s chapter, ‘Capturing the Scale of Fiction
at Mid-Century’, thus constructs a filmic model, indebted to other new technologies, for
understanding how post-1939 modernist writers developed forms to deal with the global-local
concerns associated with the growing internationalism of a war-damaged world. His essay is
followed by Dominic Head’s chapter on Leo Walmsley, which argues, firstly, for a controlled
admission of writers into the modernist canon. Head suggests that if some recourse to the aesthetic
and intellectual standards of modernism is not made, the reputation of good rural regional writing
could be jeopardised by the literary shortcomings of some of its more aesthetically and politically
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conservative new members. Walmsley, he argues, is an important writer, who explores ideas of
belonging in his regionalist novels. Head’s argument identifies a crucial paradox that recurs in
regional modernist writing: the perpetual outsider status of the observing writer. The potentially
limiting requirement of regional art to appeal to a home audience is also raised.
Meanwhile John Brannigan’s ‘Between the Islands’ makes the case for an ‘archipelagic’ model
as a means of understanding regional and national identity as well as aesthetics, in post-war British
and Irish writing. He focuses on the ‘insular’ work of Michael McLaverty. Patrick Lonergan’s
chapter begins with a train journey, and explores the moment of transition between region and
centre that J.M. Synge’s train trip from Galway to Dublin represents. The transitional space, and the
process of moving between region and centre, is explored as a process of seeing as well as being.
Lonergan also raises the issue of regional ‘authenticity’ – in this case because Synge’s ‘factual
travelogue’, The Aran Islands (1907), was criticised for portraying an inauthentic picture of the
islanders (66). This leads to wider debate about how ‘the authentic’ and ‘the regional’ have become
terms that are (sometimes ‘dangerously’) interlinked (67). The question of regional authenticity is one that arises for a number of the authors studied in
the book: some portray their protagonists, or even themselves, as perpetual outsiders whose work as
artists separates them from the traditional working communities of their regions, but who might also
be excluded from dominant, metropolitan culture because of their regional status. ‘Region’, and
especially ‘regionalism’, bring with them the idea of belonging: itself a concept that has both negative
and positive effects on communities.
Andrew Thacker’s and James Moran’s chapters consider cultures surrounding the making,
distribution and reception of regional writing. Moran, looking at Pound, Yeats and repertory
theatres, provides a fascinating short history of these regional sites of production and performance,
as well as setting up an important distinction between the ‘region’ of Dublin - as its own centre of
national culture - Northern Irish Ulster, Scottish Glasgow, and metropolitan English ‘regions’ like
Liverpool, Manchester and Birmingham. Thacker’s chapter looks at how the ‘littleness’ of ‘little
magazines’ granted them some freedom from the London-based industry of mass culture, thus
enabling publications like The New Age to foster a regional literary scene and then introduce that
regional culture to the centre.
Some of the essays explore work that is regional because its content makes reference to a
specific locale or locales. Andrew Harrison tries to re-unite James Joyce with D.H. Lawrence, despite
their conflicting ideas about aesthetics, linguistic experiment and form: these writers have much in
common, Harrison’s essay reveals, when it comes to commitment to region, indeed to birthplace.
Other essays explore work that is regional because it makes a case for an identity based on its locale,
however big that ‘locale’ might be. John Goodby and Chris Wigginton present the case for a Welsh
modernism: a modernism that was suppressed in the post-war period by the clash of an Anglooriented critical lens in England, and an anti-Anglophone, anti-modernist literary culture in Wales.
They highlight Wales’s contribution to literary modernism by reading Lynette Roberts, David Jones,
and the early, lesser-known avant-garde work of Dylan Thomas. The supposed regionalism of Basil
Bunting gets a crucial and timely reassessment by Neal Alexander. Bunting, a self-identifying
Northumbrian and, as Alexander notes, an evasive, even elusive, character, inhabits a liminal space
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between the high Modernism of Pound and Eliot, and the relative obscurity of later regional writers.
Alexander explores the contradiction between the specifically-located autobiography, and the
regional but impersonal history of Briggflatts (1965). Drew Milne appraises Hugh MacDiarmid’s
efforts to forge a language for a specifically Scottish literature. MacDiarmid proposed that his
‘synthetic Scots’ would do for Scotland what the hybrid language of Ulysses had done for Ireland.
Milne brings up questions about homeland, borderland, and alienation. He identifies the source of
modernism’s ‘transcendental homelessness’ as global capitalism which brings alienation, rather than
unification, via its trans-nationalist spread (143).
The issues that the writers studied in this volume address have a distinctly contemporary
flavour which is partly what makes this collection so timely: the devolution and dissolution of the
United Kingdom, and debates about Scottish, Welsh and Northern Irish independence; discussions
about what constitutes national and regional identities (and whether the two might ever cross over),
as well as what it means to live as a subject under global capitalism; and the apparently imminent
threats from the outside world of war and disease are all issues that come up in the collection.
Furthermore, the book has a notably fresh perspective on its subject matter due to its engagement
with recent work in the field: there are some instances where longer-established theoretical or critical
voices are oddly absent, but the effect is to create an energised, contemporary presentation.
While the collection’s aim to redraw the boundaries of the map of modernism, looking
beyond its metropolitan centres and familiar locales, is admirable, it is interesting that this quest for
difference frequently generates the sorts of white, male, middle-class perspectives that are already
represented by modernism. The subject of Irish post-colonialism is touched upon, but other former
colonial regions are not represented. The collection brings together studies of a number of women
writers: perhaps more than tend to appear in collections on modernism. However, the fact that a
healthy number of women writers appear under the term ‘regional’, with its possible implications of
a marginal, small or domestic perspective that lies outside the spheres of power and the centres of
cultural production, complicates their relative success in this field. Crucially, though, the editors’
introduction addresses a number of these issues and their subsequent collection of essays helps to
complicate and define ‘the regional’ with regards to its positive, as well as its negative, connotations.
This volume is, therefore, a revelatory and timely critical reader for anyone interested in literary
geographies, or British and Irish writing in the twentieth century, and is an important contribution to
modernist studies.
Annabel Haynes
Durham University, UK
[email protected]
John Hegglund (2012) World Views: Metageographies of Modernist Fiction. Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 224pp., $53.00 (hardback), ISBN: 9780199796106.
In the closing lines of The Waste Land (1922), T.S Eliot writes: ‘I sat upon the shore/Fishing, with
the arid plain behind me/Shall I at least set my lands in order?’ In this, as in the rest of the poem,
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Eliot is engaged in an exercise in cartography, albeit a forensic cartography. The poem, is
emblematic of early twentieth century modernism’s attempts to re-assemble, to refashion what
remained of culture and (European) civilisation after the catastrophe of World War I. The
‘fragments shored against my ruin’ that constitute The Waste Land, are precisely that: partial,
recovered, maimed. Modernism’s disturbed relationship with space is thus always predicated on a
kind of violence: the shock of the new, the distortions of technology, the displacement of settled
modes of experiencing time and space and, crucially, the extreme danger posed by modern
geopolitics.
John Hegglund’s fascinating and expansive contribution to the literature relating different
cultural spheres of modernism – the cartographic, the literary, the geographical is a work of true
interdisciplinarity and offers much to readers and scholars of these issues. Modernism – literary
modernism - is often (mistakenly) read as dealing purely in abstractions; experimentations in form
which became increasingly (and frustratingly) divorced from realism, verisimilitude and direct
representation. Hegglund, drawing on a wide range of writers from across the colonial and postcolonial worlds, draws attention to the fact that these experimentations were just as much an
exercise in attempting to understand or represent the real world, as unsettled by modernity, as they
were experiments in pure form. The core of his argument is that modernist writers were as much
geographers (physical, human, cultural) as they were members of an Avant-Garde.
The book’s chapters are structured around a series of judiciously chosen scales, each vital to
the epistemology of modernism as it was to be found in the early twentieth century: ‘Continent’,
‘Region’, ‘Internal Colony’, ‘Island’ and ‘Boundary’. The logic of this system of organisation is, as
Hegglund puts it, to ‘expand on a geographical space or scale that in some way questions,
complicates, or denies the originary primacy of the nation-state as a fundamental, essential category
of geographical knowledge’ (25), making the book an exercise in critical geopolitics as well. In the
introduction, Hegglund states that his readings of the works he includes will necessarily involve not
only the literal topography encountered within them but also a ‘metatopographia’, or ‘narrative
descriptions or citations of photographs, landscape painting, travel narratives, geographical studies,
guidebooks, or other mediations on place and space’ (15). Here, the modernist novel and its
characters are implicated in a geographical reference network, containing within it layers of
equipment, objects and techniques all vital to modernist world construction, but also inviting the
reader ‘to view with scepticism the discursive authority of cartography, photography and other
forms of spatial representation’ (15).
‘Continent’ triangulates (another theme of the book) between Joseph Conrad’s Heart of
Darkness (1899), Graham Greene’s Journey Without Maps (1936) and King Njoya’s map of Bamum,
sent by the African ruler to King George V in 1916 to request his kingdom be taken into British
protection from Germany. Hegglund argues that these texts characterise the ambiguities of Africa in
the colonial cartographic imaginary: Kurtz is produced by the geographical and climatic extremities
of Africa just as much as he is a pan-European cypher for the excesses of empire; and yet for
Conrad, just as for Greene, Africa’s ‘underlying geography consists of an unrelenting sameness’ (45).
This homogeneity – a view of Africa as a homogenous tabula rasa – simultaneously existed, though,
within the idea of its opposite: a starkly bordered grid of territories carved up by colonial powers.
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This paradox, Hegglund suggests, means that ‘modernist writers record visions of Africa as a
symbolically weighted place, but in making the imaginative journey to Africa, modernism tends to
cut the continent loose from an actually existing geography, projecting any number of symbols onto
the blank screen of the continent’ (49).
In ‘Regions’, Hegglund scales down, discussing Patrick Geddes and E.M. Forster as modernist
writers in a chorographical documentation of region. That is to say, region as: ‘A knowable space: one
that has an organic coherence and identity distinct from places exterior to it. It is more expansive
than a settlement or town, but its totality can be subjectively known and experienced’. This reading
emphasises the rooted, the genealogical, the topographical and the folkloric rather than the scientific.
The contrast between these two writers, as Hegglund sees it, is found in Geddes’s belief in the
power of modernity to create a kind of networked regionalism in which ‘city centres exist in selfsustaining relations to towns and rural districts’ (58); as against Forster’s inability to reconcile
‘English’ regionalism – ‘A localized Gemeinschaft […] at the coastal margin of England’ – with an
expansive imperial model of Britishness. This failure to find a way whereby place can be
‘represented in all of its tactile, rooted placeness without fictitiously or naively repressing the larger,
abstract spaces against which the region is necessarily defined’ (57) lies at the heart of the issue of
regionalism in modernist metageographies.
The chapter on the ‘internal colony’ addresses possibly the most famous abstraction of
modernist fiction: James Joyce’s Ulysses. Discussing how the unusual strategies of representation in
the novel oscillate between pure narrative ‘projecting individual movements through time and space
(which) ultimately must rely on partial views and situated knowledge’, and cartography which
‘promises a surveying view, but this vantage is distant, abstract and ahistorical’ (87), Hegglund draws
on Leopold Bloom’s view of the Ordnance Survey map (as the name would suggest, an organisation
who’s provenance lies in the military logistics of empire building) in order to ‘give rise to projection
and fantasy about different possible relationships between geographical space and community’ (87).
Joyce is thus conceived here as both narrative experimentalist and ironic mapmaker, opening up the
objectified space of colonised Ireland to ‘a politicized Irish sensibility – a kind of nationalism from
below’ (96), able to utilise (whilst resisting) the scientific factualism of imperial cartography.
These themes, then, run through Worldviews in much the same way as the territorial and
boundary-making practices of imperial geography divided up so much of the earth’s surface,
exposing with it their arbitrariness and dysfunction which nevertheless remained cloaked in the
scientific, objective, logical and civilising master discourses of the enlightenment. Hegglund’s book is
a fine addition to the literature, and likely to be of interest to geographers, literary scholars and
mapmakers alike.
Patrick Weir
University of Exeter, UK
[email protected]
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Mark Storey (2013) Rural Fictions, Urban Realities: A Geography of Gilded Age America.
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 208pp., £47.99 (hardback), ISBN 9780199893188.
‘Oh! What a seen! What a seen! Back and forth, passin’ and repassin’, to and fro, parasols, and dogs,
and wimmen, and men, and babies, and parasols, to and fro, to and fro. Why, is I stood there long
so crazed would I have become at the seen that I should have felt that Josiah was a To and I wuz a
Fro, or I wuz a parasol and he wuz a dog.’
Honest rustics bamboozled by bustle: Marietta Holley’s Samantha at Saratoga (1887), a bestseller
not featured in Mark Storey’s ‘archaeological’ investigation into the traces of urban modernity to be
found in countryside-set American fiction of the Gilded Age, exemplifies the rigid, oppositionseeking tendency of the geographical imagination that Rural Fictions, Urban Realities wants to
challenge. Samantha and her husband Josiah, corn-fed natives of Jonesville, NY, react antithetically
to the perceptual and ethical challenges posed by a trip to Saratoga Springs, the United States’s bestknown spa and a byword for fashionable (that is, urbane) sociability: Samantha sticks to her guns
(and her countrified vernacular); Josiah loses his head, going in for flirting and proprietary miracle
cures. But Holley, projecting what Raymond Williams famously described as a ‘Romantic structure
of feeling’, never loses sight of which spatial mood is which, structuring her narrative through a
time-honoured clash between the intimacy and simple good nature fostered by the village and the
discombobulating busy-ness, performative compulsion and hard-nosed Zweckrationalität of city living.
Storey is out to mulch such binaries. Building on the Lefebvrian insight that urban subjectivity
is not spatially but socially, politically and economically determined, Rural Fictions, Urban Realities
describes how rural-set fiction registers the countryside’s piecemeal, ambivalent and reversible
reconfiguration by and in capitalist modernity. The thesis is persuasive and well sustained, and if it is
a shame that attention to what fiction can tell us about historical change occasionally overpowers
formal concerns, it is only because the book’s ideas in the latter area are strong too - and appealingly
paradoxical. Storey wants to recover rural literature as a distinct category of enquiry, fleshing out its
relationship to more customary generic banners like regionalism, realism and naturalism, while at the
same time picking at some of the assumptions of traditional genre theory. ‘Rural fiction’ – the
monograph takes in work by canonical figures (Bret Harte, William Dean Howells), critically
fashionable novelists (Sarah Orne Jewett and Paul Laurence Dunbar) and virtually unread writers
(Maurice Thompson, Alice Brown) – describes an impossibly broad and syncretic range of texts and
concerns, and this is rather Storey’s point. Genres speak eloquently in narratives, but too
polyphonically – too interestingly – for the texts that result to be coherently parceled. As Storey puts
it: ‘If anything as circumscribed as a genre of rural fiction does emerge in this book, it is to illustrate
that it serves as an exemplary site for the dismantling of genres themselves’.
The monograph is structured thematically. Each of the first four chapters focusses on a
different ‘synechdochal counterpart’ to a key process or discourse of modernization in Gilded Age
America, with Storey ever alert to how narratives about the countryside’s absorption of
technological, spectacular, scientific and legal novelty undermine tendentious and unilinear ideas of
progress or despoliation. The first chapter, on the train journeys that regularly bookend American
fictions of the late nineteenth century, covers familiar theoretical ground, drawing on seminal work
by Wolfgang Schivelbusch and Michel de Certeau about how transport technologies alter both
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landscapes and perceiving subjects’ apprehension of those landscapes. Through readings of traintravel passages from Howells’ first novel Their Wedding Journey (1871) and ‘Up the Cooly’, a story
from Harlan Garland’s Main-Travelled Roads (1891), Storey considers the train as a primary metaphor
for urban-rural capital flows. He also shows how, viewed at speed and through the pictorializing
medium of the carriage window, the countryside takes on new appearances, with the conversion of
both known and novel sights into ‘scenes’ (or ‘seens’, as Holley’s Samantha would have it) variously
facilitating and threatening to scupper realistic and romantic modes of narration. Finally, attention to
Jewett’s ‘Going to Shrewsbury’ (1889), about an old woman taking the train for the first time,
prompts (again not strikingly new) reflections on ‘railway time’ and its part in the standardization of
temporal experience and the development of an American national consciousness.
Subsequent chapters on the travelling circus, the country doctor and lynching bring Storey’s
careful analysis to bear on less well-trodden territory. Readings of stories in which the circus irrupts
upon the rhythms of country life (texts discussed include Booth Tarkington’s first novel The
Gentleman from Indiana (1899)) highlight how mass entertainment employed distinctly modern
rational-commercial techniques to tap into ideals of ‘romantic freedom and carnivalesque excess’. In
a fascinating, Foucauldian discussion of medical science in the sticks, country doctors – the bearers
of an ‘urban-centered, and therefore urban-legitimated’ professional discourse – are posited as
disturbers of the generic peace in rural fictions. Most original of all, perhaps, is Storey’s chapter on
lynch mobs, in which he juxtaposes fictional accounts of popular justice with legal literature to
‘illuminate the fractious development, centralization, and implementation’ of modern American
criminal law.
A coda on utopian fictions of the 1880s and 1890s brings the book to a close – and us back to
Samantha and Josiah at the spa. Storey observes that many Gilded Age writers themselves sought a
way round the rural-urban binary, with the title of Henry Olerich’s A Cityless and Countryless World
(1893) encapsulating the impulse. He invokes Ebenezer Howard’s garden city movement and the
architectural visions of Frank Lloyd Wright as objective correlatives of such utopian trends in
fiction. But both Howard and Wright feel a little out of place in a conversation about Gilded Age
America, even if their work can usefully be conceived of as a reaction to the era’s urbanizing
excesses. Research into resort culture, developed precisely to cater to elite demand for the kind of
heterogeneous spatial forms Storey has in mind, might conceivably have been a better bet. Holley’s
Samantha fails to appreciate the compromise, but the watering place, written about compulsively in
the postbellum United States, is perhaps the best example the nineteenth century has to offer of a
real-life urbs in rure.
B.D. Morgan
[email protected]
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Barbara Pezzotti (2012) The Importance of Place in Contemporary Italian Crime Fiction: A
Bloody Journey. Madison, NJ.: Farleigh Dickinson University Press, 222pp., £52.95
(hardback), ISBN 9781611475524.
Roger Caillois observes in ‘The Detective Novel as Game’ (1983) that: ‘A detective in a novel uses
his ingenuity to answer the same traditional questions that an actual investigator puts to himself:
Who? When? Where? How? Why? These questions do not invoke equal interest, however: one of
them – how? – usually constitutes the central problem’ (3). Barbara Pezzotti’s A Bloody Journey: The
Importance of Place in Contemporary Italian Crime Fiction (2012) focuses on ‘Where’ by attempting to
broaden crime scenes to entire cities, regions, and ultimately a whole country. A Bloody Journey reads
like a grisly Lonely Planet guide, highlighting sites of corruption, organized crime, recent ethnic
tensions and violent historical feuds in the cities, urban sprawls and islands of Italy. ‘See Naples and
die’ used to be a popular saying among tourists reacting to its beauty; after reading A Bloody Journey it
seems surprising that anyone gets out of Italy alive. Through the medium of fiction by authors
including Piero Colaprico, Bruno Ventavoli and Andrea Camilleri, Pezzotti takes the reader through
the ‘crime scene par excellence’ of Milan (1), the ‘overpopulation, unemployment and organised
crime’ (57) of Naples, the Mafia-dominated town of Palermo, and Camilleri’s imaginary town of
Vigàta in Sicily, among other locations of violence, and toxic politics. Aiming to foreground cultural
and imagined geography in recent Italian crime fiction, Pezzotti combines two recent critical
perspectives: geocriticism, or focus on spatiality, and the study of crime fiction not just as popular or
genre fiction but as literature that reflects and represents some aspects of the real world, particularly
socio-cultural issues. (See, for example, Gill Plain’s Twentieth-century Crime Fiction: Gender, Sexuality and
the Body (2001) and David Geherin’s Scene of the Crime: The Importance of Place in Crime and Mystery Fiction
(2008)).
First published between Bertrand Westphal’s Geocriticism: Real and Fictional Spaces (2011), and
Robert T. Tally’s Spatiality (2013), A Bloody Journey is firmly a product of the ‘spatial turn’ in the
humanities. Pezzotti draws on the usual suspects of human geography and postmodernism – Yi-Fu
Tuan, Marc Augé, Edward Soja and Fredric Jameson, among others – to make the case for her
thesis and to contextualise the worlds of the fictional detectives. Although A Bloody Journey lacks the
clarifying methodological perspective that access to Westphal’s and Tally’s work might have
provided, Pezzotti’s engagement with theories of space and urbanity emphasises the importance of
geography not only in Italian crime fiction, or giallo, but the genre as a whole. In addition, she
highlights the cardinal themes of alienation, fragmented and fractious communities and erosion of
individual, civic and cultural identity. Of the Milan in Sandrone Dazieri’s (1999) ‘Gorilla’ series, for
example, Pezzotti writes:
Finally, and more importantly, it can be associated with the ‘fractal city,’ that is, the city of
multiple and divided sociality theorized by Edward Soja (2000). In fact, Dazieri’s Milan is a
simplified version of Soja’s Los Angeles: if Los Angeles is described as a mosaic of social
classes and ethnicities that live separately, constituting at the same time a kaleidoscopic urban
space, Milan is divided into two distinct and noncommunicating parts: the space of the
bourgeois and the space of the misfits. (31)
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Pezzotti goes on to describe the detective’s attitude towards this split and tense state: ‘Not only is
Milan an evil-smelling and gray place, but it is also the kingdom of artifice, with many so-called
traditional taverns restored in the 1980s and various McDonalds and supermarkets replacing old
shops (Gorilla Blues, 55)’ (31). The emphasis here, as in many of the novels Pezzotti discusses, is on
‘grayness’, on the homogenising effects of globalisation, and the idea of the seedy underbelly
prevalent in detective fiction: although Naples, Turin and the other cities under discussion may seem
bland during the day, the façade of historic architecture and tourist-driven performance hides
anxiety at best and casually murderous impulses at worst.
The magnifying glass of postmodern theory also sharpens Pezzotti’s intelligent perception of
the division between ‘cities’ and ‘urban sprawl’. While cities are linked to the hard-boiled detective
tradition, and have a sense of centre or identity even if it is corrupt and grey, the ‘perfieria diffusa
[exploded or diffuse outskirts]’ creates what Pezzotti calls a mysterious and ‘elusive’ (98) space. She
links this sense to Augé’s (1995) ‘non-place’, arguing for instance that it enables Carlo Lucarelli’s
serial killers: ‘The space of alienation, isolation and placelessness is the ideal environment for them,
as they can take advantage of its anonymity to commit their crimes’ (99). This grey non-place
contrasts with the troubled identities and heritage of the islands of Sardinia and Sicily, to which the
third section of the book is devoted. There are specific problems here that feed into the crime genre,
not least the presence of the Mafia on Sicily and the uneasy positioning of the islands between Italy
and North Africa. The investigation of the urban worlds is so thorough, however, that the insular
authors seem rather side-lined, despite Andrea Camilleri perhaps being the most famous among
non-Italians.
Pezzotti is adept at describing background: cultural history, social conflicts, political struggle
and corruption. She is similarly adept at locating where these issues unfold within the texts: in the
suburbs of Turin, for instance; or within the wider geographical context of Italian North/South
tensions. Yet the formative role of place within the action, deductions, and plot of the novels seems
curiously elusive. This is perhaps a result of the fact that Pezzotti simply covers so many authors.
Atmosphere is strongly and convincingly captured, and regional personality characteristics are
evoked, but the evidence for why these are important is sometimes incomplete. Pezzotti lists the
kinds of criminals an author prefers – Mafiosi, the wealthy elite, punks or even cannibals – but there
is so much material on display that it is often hard to map the active shaping effect of place that
seems to be suggested in the introduction. More focus on a particular text and showing specifically
how place figures into the detective’s calculations – or the criminal’s motivations and schemes –
would perhaps have strengthened her case.
Some background knowledge of Italian culture and politics, as well as geography, is assumed:
Silvio Berlusconi, for example, looms large as a symbol of a certain faction but his position and his
impact remain vague. Nevertheless, A Bloody Journey is frequently fascinating to even the non-expert.
The Italian writers that Pezzotti discusses – and interviews at the back of the book – tend to view
themselves as affiliated with the American hard-boiled tradition. Yet, ultimately, a distinctly Italian
voice emerges through Pezzotti’s critical work. Or, to be more accurate, multiple distinctively Italian
voices are celebrated as Pezzotti capably charts linguistic as well as cultural geography: her analysis
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of the regional accents and dialects different authors use and why reinforces the specificity of their
localities. Despite the fact that so many of the novels deal with the erasure of tradition and identity,
Pezzotti succeeds in charting not only an Italian crime writing identity, but many regional ones too.
Works Cited
Augé, M. (1995) Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity. London: Verso.
Caillois, R. (1983) ‘The Detective Novel as Game.’ In Most, G. W. and Stowe, W. W. (eds) The Poetics
of Murder: Detective Fiction and Literary Theory. New York: Harcourt Brace, pp. 1-12.
Dazieri, S. 1999. Attenti al Gorilla. Milan: Mondadori.
Geherin, D. (2008) Scene of the Crime: The Importance of Place in Crime and Mystery Fiction.
Jefferson, N. C.: Macfarland & Co, Inc.
Lucarelli, C. (2004) Day after Day. London: Harvill Press.
Plain, G. (2001) Twentieth-century Crime Fiction: Gender, Sexuality and the Body. Edinburgh: Edinburgh
University Press.
Soja, E. (2000) Postmetropolis: Critical Studies of Cities and Regions. Oxford: Blackwell.
Tally, R. T. (2013) Spatiality. Oxford: Routledge.
Westphal, B. (2011) Geocriticism: Real and Fictional Spaces. Trans. Tally, R., Jr. New York: Palgrave
Macmillan.
Rebecca Mills
Plymouth University, UK
plymouth.academia.edu/RebeccaMills
Eric Prieto (2013) Literature, Geography, and the Postmodern Poetics of Place. Basingstoke:
Palgrave Macmillan, 248pp., £61.00 (hardback), ISBN 9781137031112.
In his recent book, Explore Everything, Place-Hacking the City (2013), Bradley Garrett provides a
manifesto for the tech-savvy millennials of ‘these militarised, Orwellian cities we reside in’. For
Garrett, and urban explorers like him, the city is represented as a locus of systematised power and
control, the most important node within an all-embracing network of capital. This sense of
resistance is never far away in Eric Prieto’s latest book. Although Prieto uses the term ‘place’ to refer
to any socially-constructed site, his real focus remains what he calls ‘emergent forms of place’ (2). By
this he means in-between places, edgelands lying off the official map of any town or city. Prieto
describes the proliferation of these non-places, of being in a state of entre-deux, as a key condition of
postmodernity. It is to these borderlands that Prieto applies his gaze, treating such terra incognita as
social laboratories, offering dynamic insights into how all of us can embrace adaptation and
resistance in the face of the postmodern behemoth.
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To help in this journey, Prieto dismantles and then reassembles a working methodology. It is
this process that forms a key part of the book. Prieto arrives at what he calls an ‘holistic theory’
(192) which divides place into three distinct layers – phenomenological, social and natural/material –
‘a stereoscopic melding of theoretical and literary accounts of place’ (188). To get to this point,
Prieto takes the reader through an impressive analysis of key theorists, from Entrikin and Malpas, to
the poststructuralism of Foucault and Lefebvre. Yet it is Michel de Certeau who remains at the heart
of the book. And it is not hard to see why. De Certeau’s notion of tactical opposition, of urban
resistance to the state’s apparatus, chimes strongly with Prieto’s own vision for how to survive in the
twenty-first century. In his discussion of novels, poems and film, Prieto successfully demonstrates
how fictional representations both instantiate and shape the lived environment. These
representations become the glue which binds Prieto’s three layers together. Entrikin’s notion of
narrative as a ‘configurational act’, bridging the epistemological divide between subjective/objective
experience remains an important one in this context. Yet in the conclusion it is the survival of
Prieto’s own academic discipline that becomes the real focus of his concern, unmasking perhaps the
author’s primary concern with postmodernity. Borrowing E.O. Wilson’s term, ‘consilience’,
denoting the search for a grand unifying theory across the disciplines, Prieto ends with a rallying cry
for the humanities in the hope that it does not ‘disappear from the consilient equation’ (199).
It is to his credit that Prieto recognises the overlap between his own three layer model and the
rhizomatic structures proposed by Deleuze and Guattari. He criticises the latter as being theoretical
rather than practical but there is a danger that his own model is close on its heels. Although there is
interesting discussion of the Parisian banlieue and postcolonial landscapes, for example, Prieto’s
thesis remains essentially theoretical too, offering up a methodology which others are invited to
explore.
This focus on theory is a double-edged sword. Although it provides a strong foundation for
Prieto to explore the evolution of social-constructed notions of ‘place’, it offers little in terms of
practicalities, of the sort of urban transgression that de Certeau in particular was championing. This
is a shame as one of the more interesting aspects of de Certeau’s work is the relationship that he
expounds between storifying and space. For de Certeau, the act of walking creates a ‘space of
enunciation’, individual journeys forming ‘unforeseeable sentences’ across the city. A reader
translates a written text, an encoded system of signs, into a story; in the same way the urban
planners’ map of symbols and signs is transformed into a ‘practiced place’ through the act of
walking. Notably absent too is the iconic figure of Baudelaire’s flâneur or reference to Guy Debord
and the Situationists. The latter’s free-form psychological wanderings of the dérive would seem
particularly apt in terms of Prieto’s wider aims, as would the activities of psychogeographers, the
reclamation of the forgotten places, of mentally re-booting the city through the creative act of the
physical journey. De Certeau saw such ‘tactical and makeshift’ actions as part of what he called a
‘network of an antidiscipline’, a deconstruction of cityspace through the formation of alternative
narratives. Prieto’s holistic model needs to explicitly embrace these ideas.
Throughout his book the ‘citizen’ is notably absent. The individual’s role in the creation of
new meanings remains abstract. This is a shame as the theoretical discussions provide an excellent
bedrock on which to build a more critical examination of ‘poetics’ itself in terms of movement, place
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and memory. Yet Prieto’s ambition to examine the meaning of place in the twenty-first century
remains an important one. As cities become evermore complex, and our relationship to space
increasingly mediated through mobile technology, there remains a growing imperative to understand
how their citizens can find fulfilment. Yet Prieto is only partly right when he says that the answer lies
in the postmodern edgelands of the Parisian banlieue or the postcolonial hinterland. If there is a
lesson from the psychogeographers and the Situationists, it is that all space is entre-deux, each and
every path we take interstitial. Perhaps the solutions Prieto is trying to find lay much closer to home
than he thinks.
Works Cited
Bradley, G. (2013) Explore Everything, Place-Hacking the City. London: Verso.
Spencer Jordan
University of Nottingham
[email protected]
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