A Fractured Landscape of Modernity: Culture and Conflict in the Isle of Purbeck [Hardcover]

This book uses the contradictions, fractures and coincidences of a twentieth-century rural landscape to explore new methods of writing place beyond 'new nature writing'. In doing so it opens up new ways of reading modernist artists and writers such as Vanessa Bell, Mary Butts and Paul Nash.List of Figures Acknowledgements Introduction 1. Studland Beach 2. The Hollow Land 3. Seaside Surrealism 4. Purbeck Underground Afterword Bibliography Index

'Wilkes' book is timely. It sits alongside a growing body of work which, Lorimer and Parr note, demonstrates 'a preparedness to experiment with different ways of telling' (2014, page 544). In A Fractured Landscape of Modernity experimentation has enabled Wilkes to approach the 'telling' of Purbeck's multiples histories and imageries, through the use of ' narrative as a creative method as well as subject of critical analysis' (Daniels and Lorimer 2012, page 4).' - Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 2014

James Wilkes is a researcher and writer with interests in modernist art and literature, contemporary landscape writing and poetry. His poetry publications include the collection Weather A System (2009) and the chapbook Reviews (2009). He has taught at Birkbeck College and the University of East Anglia.