Space is the Place: Space, Place and Transformation in the work of James Attlee

While place and movement are central to much of my published work, this critical appraisal concentrates on two non-fiction travel books: Isolarion: A Different Oxford Journey (Attlee, 2007/2020) and Station to Station (Attlee, 2015), as well as one locative digital fiction, The Cartographer’s Confession (Attlee, 2017). The appraisal is structured around key statements by the geographer Fi-Fu Tuan, particularly from his book Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience (1981) and his Farewell Lecture, delivered in 2014. I will be examining how undifferentiated space can be transformed into meaningful location in life and on the page, as well as in the emerging form of locative digital fiction; how place itself can become a prison to which space offers an escape; and how the new dimension offered by digital technology can, when harnessed for literary ends, expand rather than detract from our engagement with the world around us. Investigation of my own work will be contextualised through reference to authors, philosophers and spatial theorists ranging from the 17th to the 21st centuries, including Robert Burton, Roland Barthes, Horatio Clare, Guy Debord, Richard Mabey, Herman Melville, Iain Sinclair and James Wood, among others.

Grantor dc:publisher

Oxford Brookes University

Year dc:date

2020

Author dc:creator

• Attlee, James

Contributors dc:contributor

• Lea, Daniel

Statement dc:rights

• All rights reserved

Language dc:language

en

DOI dc:identifier

https://doi.org/10.24384/nzsd-mx07

OAI identifier oai:identifier

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