Dr Andrew Radford 
Mapping the Wessex Novel [PDF ebook] 
Landscape, History and the Parochial in British Literature, 1870-1940

By discussing the work of Thomas Hardy, Richard Jefferies, John Cowper Powys and Mary Butts,  
Mapping the Wessex Novel imaginatively maps and excavates various districts of the  »west country » so as radically to redefine the  »parochial »; while being keenly aware of their own status as natives locked into complex histories of self-exile and return, estrangement and ardent identification.

Contributing to the growing research on space and place in Victorian and Modernist writing, Radford uses the analysis of these writers as a lens through which to inspect the relationship between rural periphery and metropolitan centre; contested ideologies of  »Englishness » and the form of the national past.