Monica North with Magali Roberts

By Peter Brown, Stuart Hutchinson and Michael Irwin.

To Chaucer's Parson it was 'Jerusalem celestial'. Lyly thought the city 'somewhat decayed yet beautiful to behold'. For Jane Austen Canterbury was a place where she and her brother 'walked about snugly together and shopp'd'. A despondent Keats hoped that a visit would 'set [him] forward like a Billiard Ball'. Cobbett found the city 'remarkable for cleanliness and niceness, not withstanding it has a cathedral in it'. Dickens recalled 'the sunny street … dozing as it were in the hot light', whereas Karl Marx considered that the city 'had no trace of poetry about it. Henry James noticed a cloister 'very dusky and mouldy and dilapidated, and of course very sketchable', and Virginia Woolf believed Canterbury to be lovelier than Florence or Venice.

This literary guide, now extensively revised, brings together over fifty writers from Chaucer to T. S. Eliot who responded to Canterbury and who helped to create the image of the city as it exists today.

Written City includes numerous illustrations, and directions for a series of trips on foot, by car and by bus to suit every kind of literary pilgrim.

The authors are members of the School of English at the University of Kent.

ISBN 0 947710 094 £4.95

Available from the Albion Bookshop, Mercery Lane, Canterbury

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Already published:

Written City: A Literary Guide to Canterbury
by Peter Brown, Stuart Hutchinson and Michael Irwin
ISBN: 0 947710 09 4

Shorelines: A Literary Guide to North-east Kent
by Monica North and Magali Roberts

In preparation:

The Channel Ports

The Isle of Thanet

Distributed exclusively by the Albion Bookshop,
Mercery Lane, Canterbury, to which
all enquiries should be made.

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Peter Brown / Michael Irwin (eds)
Literature and Place 1800-2000
Oxford, Bern, Berlin, Bruxelles, Frankfurt am Main, New York, Wien, 2006. 235 pp., 10 ill.
ISBN 3-906758-62-1 / US-ISBN 0-8204-5078-2 pb.
sFr. 67.– / E* 45.90 / E** 42.90 / £ 30.– / US-$ 50.95
* includes VAT – only valid for Germany and Austria   ** does not include VAT

Direct link:
http://www.peterlang.com/index.cfm?vLang=E&vID=75862

Ten original essays examine the transactions between real places and the literary imagination, including the reinvention of real places in literary form, from 1800 to the present day. They deal with different kinds of locations (islands, countries, cities), the topoi writers use to articulate a sense of place (maps, ruins, landscape, history), their generic manifestations in fiction, travel writing, topography, (auto)biography and poetry, and the theoretical and methodological issues which arise. The focus moves outwards from local to regional and national issues, covering questions of cultural identity, space, representation, historicity, and modernity in England, Scotland, Ireland, France, Germany, the United States, and the South Pacific. The contributors are drawn from both sides of the Atlantic, and represent established scholars as well as newer voices.

Contents: Peter Brown: Introduction – Michael Irwin: Maps of Fictional Space – Malcolm Andrews: The English Cottage as Cultural Critique and Associationist Paradigm – Murray Baumgarten: Urban Labyrinths: Dickens and the Pleasures of Place – David Blair: Scott, Cartography, and the Appropriation of Scottish Place – Sarah Fulford: Between Past and Future: The Place of Seamus Heaney – Stephen Bann: Proust, Ruskin, Stokes, and the Topographical Project – Martin Kane: A Fictional Place: Constructions and Reconstitutions of the GDR before and after German Unification – Stuart Hutchinson: ‘Past the School Book Depository, through Dealey Plaza and beneath the Triple Underpass’: Place in Don DeLillo’s Fiction – Robert L. Dorman: From the Middle of Nowhere to the Heartland: The Great Plains and American Regionalism.

The Editors: Peter Brown and Michael Irwin are co-directors of the Literature and Place research project, based in the School of English at the University of Kent.

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Bird, Eric and James, Lilian (eds).Writers on the Coast: Kent, Sussex, Hampshire & the Isle of Wight. Moreton-in-Marsh, Gloucs.: Windrush Press, 1992.