Affective Landscapes in Literature, Art and Everyday Life

Christine Berberich is Senior Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Portsmouth, Neil Campbell is Professor of American Studies in the College of Law, Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Derby, and Robert Hudson is Professor of European History and Cultural Politics in the College of Law, Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Derby.

'This book takes us into a world that seems oddly familiar, but as it casts a critical light on the people, places and processes through which life is made, it reveals aspects of our world that too frequently elude and slip past us. Through passionate, rich and at times deeply moving prose, this is a book that encourages us to look-again and bring into plain sight the complex, intimate and lived nature of our everyday lives.' Angharad Saunders, University of South Wales, UK"This ambitious and imaginatively conceived collection of essays constitutes a fertile and welltimed intervention in current debates around the literary and cultural perceptions and representations of place and space, and one which readers and scholars in the field of ecocriticism and creative nature writing will find both stimulating and thought-provoking. (…) In sum, this book offers an imaginatively varied, timely and wide-ranging, if at times eclectic, investigation of the ways in which affect theory, initially motivated by and rooted in Merleau-Ponty and other theorists, has moved on to facilitate and energise new cultural, literary and aesthetic interpretations of human(e) bodily responses to the natural environment". - Roger Ebbatson, Lancaster University

• Part 1 Peripheral Cultures: 'You're not in Ireland now': landscape and loss in Irish women's poetry. At some distance from the Scottish mainland: urban television producers and Hebridean Islands. Part 2 Memory and Mobility: Placing affect: remembering strangers at roadside crash shrines. Speed and stillness: driving in the countryside. Part 3 Suburbs and Estates: Doomed developments in the desert: re-reading land development, the American family and ordinary places in a time of 'cruel optimism'. A child in the suburb. At once irrational and objective: photography's construction of place. Part 4 Literature and Place: 'Other than they were': fair places full of folk. Great plains' vernacular: why spatial idiolect matters. 'The last pure place on earth': Antarctic affect in Jenny Diski's Skating to Antarctica and Sara Wheeler's Terra Incognita. Plots: the narrative of place in contemporary nature writing. Part 5 Sensescapes: Dancing - worlding the beach: revealing connections through phenomenological movement inquiry. Listening at home. In-between places: envisioning and accessing new landscapes.