Reading Place Writing

Creative nonfictional writing about place became increasingly prominent in British and Irish literary culture during the 2010s. More particularly, a wide range of writers, exploring a diverse range of landscapes, focused on the local and the everyday in examining ‘the undiscovered country of the nearby’ (Robert Macfarlane). This literary geographical monograph is the first book-length study of such works of place writing and offers detailed readings of key texts by, amongst others, Elizabeth-Jane Burnett, Rachel Lichtenstein, Amy Liptrot, Iain Sinclair, Richard Skelton, and Jean Sprackland. Many of these place writing books have been described as immersive works of literature; but, to date, the precise meaning of that term has remained unexamined. How, then, do a range of creative nonfictional texts from the 2010s function as works of immersive place writing? By extension, how do such creative nonfictional texts – rooted, as they are, in the articulation of actual geographical experience – complicate the understanding of what it means for a reader to be imaginatively immersed in a literary work? Reading Place Writing explores these critical questions through an interdisciplinary enlacing of geographical thought, cognitive linguistics, narrative theory, and a series of creative-critical interventions.