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.

'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

• List of Figures Acknowledgements Introduction 1. Studland Beach 2. The Hollow Land 3. Seaside Surrealism 4. Purbeck Underground Afterword Bibliography Index