Narrative
Re-citing the Archive: Fieldwork, Fiction and the Politics of Memory
This paper proposes a speculative feminist historiography that re-cites the archive through embodied fieldwork, fictional personae, and the politics of memory. Drawing on site-specific research, situated within Brontë Country, West Yorkshire I explore how sensory gestures—walking, touching, re-enacting—activate archival fragments and reframe landscape as a mnemonic field. The archive here is not a static repository but a haunted space—one that migrates across media, bodies, and temporalities. By foregrounding the performative dimensions of archival practice — writing, walking, re-collecting, recollecting, reciting, re-citing and remembering, the archive, in this context, is a multisensory terrain and a site of negotiation, where memory is contested, reanimated, and re-authored.
Central to this inquiry is the figure of Phyliss Dare, a fictional persona who enables a methodological slippage between researcher and archive, past and present, fact and fiction. Dare operates as both structuring device and speculative method, enabling a mode of citation that foregrounds absence, polyphony, and narrative slippage. Her presence as explorer, travel guide, writer, and photographer allows for a reframing of fieldwork as fictional encounter, one that destabilises linear historiography and opens space for embodied speculation. Through Dare the archive becomes a stage for performance, where gestures of citation are enacted rather than merely recorded.
Rather than reconstructing a lost narrative or a singular past, the work proposes a historiography in which archival gestures become vehicles of resonance, resistance and reanimation. By triangulating fieldwork, fiction, and citation, I argue for a historiographic practice that is both materially grounded and imaginatively expansive. This method foregrounds the politics of memory, whose stories are told, whose gestures are preserved, and insists on the archive as a live site of encounter. In doing so, it offers a framework for engaging with historical material not only recovered as evidence, but re-situated within a living, shifting terrain where bodies landscapes and narratives converge.
Literary Landscapes
Sixty maps, a gazetteer, and critical essays place the great writers of England, Scotland, Wales, and Ireland against the background of their native regions. Identifies geographic locations mentioned in the works of English authors and discusses the influence locations may have had on their work.
Contents:
–Chaucer’s world: Chaucer’s London; Touring with Chaucer’s pilgrims; Chaucer overseas: the country of his mind —
–Shakespeare’s London —
–Dr. Johnson’s London —
–Charles Dickens’s London —
–Virginia Woolf’s London : a walking tour with Mrs. Dalloway —
–Bath —
–Lake poets —
–Romantic poets abroad —
–Bronte country —
–Thomas Hardy’s Wessex —
–Blackening of England —
–Scotland in literature : Kidnapped: a topographical novel; Edinburgh —
–Dublin of Yeats and Joyce: After Parnell; Wanderings of Ulysses; Other testimony —
–Atlas and gazetteer section: Atlas; General gazetteer; London gazetteer; Westminster Abbey, St. Paul’s Cathedral, Inns of Court; Schools; Geographical index.
‘Zone’
Still from Andrei Tarkovsky, Stalker, 1979
“All things are engaged in writing their history…Not a foot steps into the snow, or along the ground, but prints in character more or less lasting, a map of its march.The ground is all memoranda and signatures; and every object covered over with hints. In nature, this self registration is incessant, and the narrative is the print of the seal.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson (1850) quoted in Robert Macfarlane, The Old Ways, A Journey on Foot, Penguin Books: London 2013, pp.5
Image reproduced from Andrei Tarkovsky, Stalker, 1979, http://dinca.org/stalker-poster-artwork-tarkovski-surrealism/1058.htm
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