This Way, That Way, Forward and Back Way

Abstract

J ohn B rannigan's A rchipelagic M odernism begins with disaster. Richard Jefferies's After London (1885) is its starting point – a book which, as Brannigan puts it, ‘imagined a future in which the geography of England has been dramatically altered by environmental catastrophe’ (p. 1). An unspecified event has turned London to swampland and forced power to the provinces. The margins have become not only the centre, but the only ground available; Irish, Scots, and Welsh renegades commit ‘dreadful acts of piracy’ (p. 1). The ‘sympathetic explanation’ given by Jefferies for these acts is, for Brannigan, a suggestion that they might be ‘seen as a kind of moral retribution for the injuries inflicted by England on other peoples’ (p. 2). This is a portrait of a radically redistributed, no-longer-‘British’ Isles catalysed by nature itself, and as such it is a fitting opening for Brannigan's book, for Archipelagic Modernism traces a literary tradition committed to a ‘plural and connected’ (p. 6) view of the North Atlantic archipelago, stripped of either utopian idealism or Anglocentric, or perhaps more accurately London-centric, myopia.