A Fractured Landscape of Modernity ― Culture and Conflict in the Isle of Purbeck

The recent rise of 'new nature writing' has renewed the question of how a landscape can be written. This book intervenes in this debate by proposing innovative methodologies for writing place that recognize and make use of the contradictions, fractures and coincidences found in a modern landscape. In doing so, it develops original readings of modernist artists and writers who were associated with the Isle of Purbeck in Dorset, including Vanessa Bell, Paul Nash, Eric Benfield and Mary Butts. Their work is set alongside embodied practices of leisure and labour such as sea bathing, beachcombing, quarrying, tourism and scientific fieldwork, as well as the material and geological features of the environment with which such activities are allied. By showing the Isle of Purbeck to be a site where versions of modernity were actively generated and contested, the book contributes to a reassessment of the significance of rural locations for English modernism.

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 Ravensbourne College.