The story goes that in 1841, the poet John Clare escaped from High Beach Asylum in Epping Forest and, heading towards his home in Northborough, covered eighty miles over three-and-a-half days. On foot and alone, he was searching for his lost love, Mary Joyce a woman already three years dead In Iain Sinclair s hands, the bare facts of John Clare's story turn both strange and elliptical. Armed with curiosity and a sense that his work has from the first been haunted by Clare, Sinclair together with fellow diviners and other stragglers of the road sets out to recreate Clare's walk away from madness and to explore his own obsession with the poet. Keats, De Quincey, Blake, Pepys, Shelley, Joyce, Beckett, artist Brian Catling and magus Alan Moore along with Sinclair's wife Anna, who shares a connection with Clare are his fellow travellers on a journey that becomes an exercise in memory and erasure encompassing parents, grandparents and other ancestral ghosts. expression in Sinclair's deep-digging fiction of biography where memoir, history, travel, mystery and dreamstory combine in a magnificent eulogy to madness and to sanity along the borders of which may lie the poet's muse.

“Henderson teaches us how to wonder anew with a new vision of science illuminated by a rich range of literature, philosophy, art, and music.” —Hugh Aldersey-Williams, author of Dutch Light We live in a world that is known, every corner thoroughly explored. But has this knowledge cost us the ability to wonder? Wonder, Caspar Henderson argues, is at its most supremely valuable in just such a world because it reaffirms our humanity and gives us hope for the future. That’s the power of wonder, and that’s what we should aim to cultivate in our lives. But what are the wonders of the modern world? Henderson’s brilliant exploration borrows from the form of one of the oldest and most widely known sources of wonder: maps. Large, detailed mappae mundi invited people in medieval Europe to vividly imagine places and possibilities they had never seen before: manticores with the head of a man, the body of a lion, and the stinging tail of a scorpion; tribes of one-eyed men who fought griffins for diamonds; and fearsome Scythian warriors who drank the blood of their enemies from their skulls. A New Map of Wonders explores these and other realms of the wonderful, in different times and cultures and in the present day, taking readers from Aboriginal Australian landscapes to sacred sites in Great Britain, all the while keeping sight questions such as the cognitive basis of wonder and the relationship between wonder and science. Beautifully illustrated and written with wit and moral complexity, this sequel to The Book of Barely Imagined Beings is a fascinating account of the power of wonder and an unforgettable meditation on its importance to our future.

Romantic Cartographies is the first collection to explore the reach and significance of cartographic practice in Romantic-period culture. Revealing the diverse ways in which the period sought to map and spatialise itself, the volume also considers the engagement of our own digital cultures with Romanticism's 'map-mindedness'. Original, exploratory essays engage with a wide range of cartographic projects, objects and experiences in Britain, and globally. Subjects range from Wordsworth, Clare and Walter Scott, to Romantic board games and geographical primers, to reveal the pervasiveness of the cartographic imagination in private and public spheres. Bringing together literary analysis, creative practice, geography, cartography, history, politics and contemporary technologies – just as the cartographic enterprise did in the Romantic period itself – Romantic Cartographies enriches our understanding of what it means to 'map' literature and culture.

Studies the work of British film-maker and writer Patrick Keiller, German writer W. G. Sebald, and Welsh writer and film-maker Iain Sinclair to illustrate how they represent a highly significant moment in English literature and film's engagement with landscape and environment.

Writing landscapes inevitably occurs in dialogue with a long textual and pictorial tradition, but first-hand experience also provides key stimuli to many writers’ accounts. This monograph employs a comparative lens to offer an intervention in debates between literary scholars who focus on genre and those cultural geographers who are concerned that self-perpetuating literary tropes marginalize practical engagements. Suggesting that representation and experience are not competing paradigms for landscape, Daniel Weston argues that in the hands of contemporary writers they are complementary forces building composite articulations of place. In five case studies, Weston matches a writer to a mode of apprehending place - W.G. Sebald with picturing, Ciaran Carson with mapping, Iain Sinclair with walking, Robert Macfarlane with engaging, Kathleen Jamie with noticing. Drawing out a range of sites at which representation and experience interact, Weston's argument is twofold: first, interaction between traditions of landscape writing and direct experience of landscapes are mutually influential; and second, writers increasingly deploy style, form, and descriptive aesthetics to recover the experience of place in the poetics of the text itself. As Weston shows, emergent landscape writing shuttles across generic boundaries, reflecting the fact that the landscapes traversed are built out of a combination of real and imaginary sources.

"Alastair Bonnett persuades us that the left can come to terms with nostalgia, because nostalgia---if the left did but realize it---is both a fact and an underutilized quality of leftist thought, and to prove it, Left in the Past conspires an unexpected rendezvous between early socialism, post-colonialism, and situationism. The book's novel readings of renowned cultural theories on the one hand, and exposes of arcane psycogeography on the other, will intrigue scholars, activists and students alike in virtually any area of politics, the arts, the humanities and social sciences." Simon Sadler, Professor of Architectural and Urban History, University of California, Davis In Left in the Past, Alastair Bonnett re-assesses the place of nostalgia within radical politics and, in doing so, provides a new introduction to the history and politics of the left. Left in the Past argues that nostalgia has been an important, but repressed, aspect of the socialist imagination. The book begins by showing the centrality and repression of nostalgia in both 19th-century radicalism and anti-colonial radicalism. This is followed by an examination of the consequences of this inheritance amongst revolutionary intellectuals in the twentieth century. Bonnett shows that, today, in our "post-socialist era", the relationship between radicalism and a sense of loss, and the ambivalent position of socialism in and against modernity, can and must be re-examined. Bonnett's unique approach to the left makes Left in the Past a provocative but necessary resource for anyone interested in the history and politics of the left and radicalism.