I was supposed to write about writers, not with them. He felt that this book would be fatally compromised because I saw my stories and poems as integral to its commentary. To him, creative writing is expressive, not analytical. I expected the question, but it’s taken me a while to formulate an answer. I pointed at him and he said, ‘Doesn’t this sort of approach undermine your position as a literary critic? Writing a book with poems and short stories in it?’ Green Unpleasant Land argues that, in response to recent advances in British imperial history, contemporary authors have reshaped the pastoral writing to break the powerful association between the countryside and Englishness. This is a shared history: Britons’ ancestors either profited from empire or were impoverished by it. Fowler, who herself comes from a family of slave-owners, argues that Britain’s cultural and economic legacy is not simply expressed by chinoiserie, statues, monuments, galleries, warehouses and stately homes. It also explores the links between rural poverty, particularly enclosure, and colonial figures, such as plantation-owners and East India Company nabobs. Green Unpleasant Land explores the repressed history of rural England’s links to transatlantic enslavement and the East India Company.Ĭombining essays, poems and stories, it details the colonial links of country houses, moorlands, woodlands, village pubs and graveyards. Selected by Bernardine Evaristo as an Observer Best Books 2021
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