Abstract
The term ‘literary geography’ was coined by William Sharp (aka Fiona McLeod) as long ago as 1904, and has been a feature of the discourse of both literary critics and human geographers for many decades. However, the 21st century has seen a burgeoning interest in re-evaluating the relationships between ‘literature’ and ‘geography’ within an interdisciplinary context. Recent work by Marc Brosseau and Sheila Hones, Franco Moretti and Bertrand Westphal has been particularly influential in this regard, and Jon Anderson’s Page and Place is a welcome and valuable contribution to this still-emergent critical field. The book’s focus on 11 texts by contemporary Welsh writers also lends weight to the ongoing spatial turn in the more specialised field of Welsh writing in English, building on work by Matthew Jarvis, Damian Walford Davies, Alice Entwistle and others.
Anderson is a human geographer by trade and training, and one of the strengths of Page and Place is the adroit and suggestive manner in which he brings geographical concepts to bear upon the literary texts he discusses. For instance, Peter Finch’s Real Cardiff books are treated as instances of ‘imaginative archaeology’ (p. 52), whereas Lloyd Robson’s ‘Edge Territory’ of the same city (Roath-Adamsdown-Splott) is aptly considered a ‘third space’ (p. 108). Niall Griffiths’ Aberystwyth novels are explored for their invocations of the ‘awful sublime’ in landscapes of ‘wild’ nature (p. 173), and Owen Sheers’ Olchon Valley (in Resistance) is described as a ‘Temporary Autonomous Zone’ (p. 284). At the same time, Anderson is sensitive to the ways in which literature – and especially ‘fiction’ – can enhance our understandings of the complex inter-relations between people and place, identity and geography. The burden of his opening chapter is to show how thoroughly the lived experiences of places are ‘entangled’ with our fictional representations of those places. In this regard, ‘plot’ can be understood as referring simultaneously to literal territories (a plot of land) and to literary story-lines (a twist in the plot). Plots are entanglements of page and place that are ‘composed’ and ‘performed’, events that are taking place (p. 26). Accordingly, each chapter of the book follows one or more ‘plotlines’ through the work of a single author to identify the unique ways in which page and place are mutually imbricated in a range of different texts.
Anderson is articulate and persuasive when dealing with concepts and theories, even if his approach is never quite as ‘unique’ or original as he wants to claim (p. 11). On the whole, however, his analyses of the literary texts are less successful, chiefly because he tends to fall back on description, paraphrase, and broad-brush contextualisation rather than offering detailed close readings. The nuances of form, language, and narrative technique get lost as Anderson segues into excerpts from interviews with authors or very long quotations from the texts, which are left to speak for themselves. It is also unclear why ‘belonging’ – rather than ‘mobility’, say, or ‘wayfaring’ – is taken to be so essential to the human condition, functioning as a kind of master-narrative throughout Page and Place. At times, this leads to some questionable claims concerning ‘the umbilical relationship between Welsh people and their places’ (p. 223). At others, it means that Anderson regards the emphases that writers such as Iain Sinclair and Tessa Hadley place upon deracination and displacement as simply another way of belonging or striving to belong.
Notwithstanding these caveats, Anderson’s book is always stimulating and intellectually nimble. It should be read by anyone with an interest in the manifold transactions that occur between page and place.