LITERARY LANDSCAPES

The landscapes of enduring fictional characters, and their stories, are brought vividly to life, provoking all the sights and sounds of the literary world. Follow Leopold Bloom's footsteps around Dublin in James Joyce's Ulysses, hear the music of the Mississippi River steamboats that set the score for Twain's Huckleberry Finn, experience the rugged bleakness of Newfoundland in Annie Proulx's The Shipping News, or the soft Neapolitan breezes in Elena Ferrante's My Brilliant Friend. The selections range from romantic prospects of Jane Austen's Bath in her novel Persuasion of 1817, Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights, Charles Dickens's Bleak House and Victor Hugo's Les Miserables, Leo Tolstoy's Anna Karenina and Thomas Hardy's The Return of the Native. In Mapping Modernism, we see D.H. Lawrence at The Rainbow, Edith Wharton's The Age of Innocence, F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Green Gatsby to A.A. Milne's Winnie the Pooh in the Ashdown Forest, East Sussex. There are post-war panoramas and contemporary geography right through to Francis Spofford's Golden Hill, New York 2016. The places range over social time, historical time and geological time, and all the works described in this volume capture and build upon a sense of the authors having been to, seen, or experienced things that relate to the qualities of that place in combination with cultural and geographical specifics. From Hardy's Wessex to Mishima's Japan, from Bulgakov's Moscow to Chinua Achebe's pre-colonial life in Nigeria, the author interweaves his knowledge of folklore with authentic details of life. This is a book for all Bibliophiles to read, relish and learn from, with insights to enrich your pleasures in and reward from great literature. 256 beautifully designed pages, packed with colour photographs and images.