Writing London and the Thames Estuary
Subtitle: 1576-2016
Publisher: BRILL
Published: 2017
Language: eng
Number of pages: 215
ISBN-13: 9789004346659
Subjects: Cultural pluralism in literature; English literature, history and criticism
Description: Writing London and the Thames Estuary' is an ambitious study of place and identity which resonates deeply against the troubled politics of contemporaneity. Drawing on a broad range of cultural materials including novels, film, theatre, tourist literature, topography, chorology and sociological writing, Len Platt traces the making of the estuary as margin by a metropolis that has been dependant on this region, sometimes for its very survival. Drawing on writers and artists ranging from Middleton, Defoe, Pepys, Dickens, Conrad and T. S Eliot through to such contemporary figures as Iain Sinclair, Nicola Barker, Tracy Emin and Billy Childish, Platt offers a fascinating insight into the formation of 'estuary grotesque', the social dismissal out of which post-Brexit politics have emerged to such controversy.