A London writer comes to recognise his growing obsession with the Ewyas Valley on the border of England and Wales. Ewyas has been the site of persistent attempts to found or imagine utopian communities, all fascinated by the mythology of the west: Anglican renegade Father Ignatius, hippie communes, Allen Ginsberg, Bruce Chatwin, teepee dwellers, mushroom gobblers, narco pirates.

This book analyses the spatial politics of a range of British novelists writing on London since the 1950s, emphasizing spatial representation as an embodied practice at the point where the architectural landscape and the body enter into relation with each other. Colombino visits the city in connection with its boundaries, abstract spaces and natural microcosms, as they stand in for all the conflicting realms of identity; its interstices and ruins are seen as inhabited by bodies that reproduce internally the external conditions of political and social struggle. The study brings into focus the fiction in which London provides not a residual interest but a strong psychic-phenomenological grounding, and where the awareness of the physical reality of buildings and landscape conditions shape the concept of the subject traversing this space. Authors such as J. G. Ballard, Geoff Dyer, Michael Moorcock, Peter Ackroyd, Iain Sinclair, Geoff Ryman, Tom McCarthy, Michael Bracewell and Zadie Smith are considered in order to map the relationship of body, architecture and spatial politics in contemporary creative prose on the city. Through readings that are consistently informed by recent developments in urban studies and reflections formulated by architects, sociologists, anthropologists and art critics, this book offers a substantial contribution to the burgeoning field of literary urban studies.

The 1990s proved to be a particularly rich and fascinating period for British fiction. This book presents a fresh perspective on the diverse writings that appeared over the decade, bringing together leading academics in the field. British Fiction of the 1990s: traces the concerns that emerged as central to 1990s fiction, in sections on millennial anxieties, identity politics, the relationship between the contemporary and the historical, and representations of contemporary space offers distinctive new readings of the most important novelists of the period, including Martin Amis, Beryl Bainbridge, Pat Barker, Julian Barnes, A.S. Byatt, Hanif Kureishi, Ian McEwan, Iain Sinclair, Zadie Smith and Jeanette Winterson shows how British fiction engages with major cultural debates of the time, such as the concern with representing various identities and cultural groups, or theories of ‘the end of history’ discusses 1990s fiction in relation to broader literary and critical theories, including postmodernism, post-feminism and postcolonialism. Together the essays highlight the ways in which the writing of the 1990s represents a development of the themes and styles of the post-war novel generally, yet displays a range of characteristics distinct to the decade.

Introduction by Adrian Shaughnessy. Text by Simon Worthington, Damian Jaques, Pauline van Mourik Broekman.

Iain Sinclair has a growing reputation as a novelist and writer of documentary non--fiction. This study covers his major works, but also seeks to trace the connections between the writings and his earlier books of poetry. Indeed, it traces the intertextual curve of Sinclair's entire oeuvre, and demonstrates that its unity lies in the very desire to make connections between disparate cultural experience, for example between the context of avant garde poetry that Sinclair emerged from, and the world of pulp fiction that he has negotiated as a book dealer and an editor.