While place and movement are central to much of my published work, this critical appraisal concentrates on two non-fiction travel books: Isolarion: A Different Oxford Journey (Attlee, 2007/2020) and Station to Station (Attlee, 2015), as well as one locative digital fiction, The Cartographer’s Confession (Attlee, 2017). The appraisal is structured around key statements by the geographer Fi-Fu Tuan, particularly from his book Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience (1981) and his Farewell Lecture, delivered in 2014. I will be examining how undifferentiated space can be transformed into meaningful location in life and on the page, as well as in the emerging form of locative digital fiction; how place itself can become a prison to which space offers an escape; and how the new dimension offered by digital technology can, when harnessed for literary ends, expand rather than detract from our engagement with the world around us. Investigation of my own work will be contextualised through reference to authors, philosophers and spatial theorists ranging from the 17th to the 21st centuries, including Robert Burton, Roland Barthes, Horatio Clare, Guy Debord, Richard Mabey, Herman Melville, Iain Sinclair and James Wood, among others.
Permanent link to this resource: https://doi.org/10.24384/nzsd-mx07
Attlee, James
Supervisors: Lea, Daniel
Department of English and Modern LanguagesFaculty of Humanities and Social Sciences
Year: 2020
© Attlee, James Published by Oxford Brookes UniversityAll rights reserved. Copyright © and Moral Rights for this thesis are retained by the author and/or other copyright owners. A copy can be downloaded for personal non-commercial research or study, without prior permission or charge. This thesis cannot be reproduced or quoted extensively from without first obtaining permission in writing from the copyright holder(s). The content must not be changed in any way or sold commercially in any format or medium without the formal permission of the copyright holders.