Download or read book Mapping the Wessex Novel written by Andrew Radford and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2010-08-26 with total page 193 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: By discussing the work of Thomas Hardy, Richard Jefferies, John Cowper Powys and Mary Butts, Mapping the Wessex Novel imaginatively maps and excavates various districts of the 'west country' so as radically to redefine the 'parochial'; while being keenly aware of their own status as natives locked into complex histories of self-exile and return, estrangement and ardent identification. Contributing to the growing research on space and place in Victorian and Modernist writing, Radford uses the analysis of these writers as a lens through which to inspect the relationship between rural periphery and metropolitan centre; contested ideologies of 'Englishness' and the form of the national past.