Sandscapes

Writing the British Seaside

Jo Carruthers, Nour Dakkak, Jo Carruthers, Nour Dakkak

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9783030447793
• eBook ISBN:
  9783030447809
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Historiography
• Index: Literature

Sandscapes: Writing the British Seaside reflects on the unique topography of sand, sandscapes, and the seaside in British culture and beyond. This book brings together creative and critical writings that explore the ways sand speaks to us of holidays and respite, but also of time and mortality, of plenitude and eternity. Drawing together writers from a range of backgrounds, the volume explores the environmental, social, personal, cultural, and political significance of sand and the seaside towns that have built up around it. The contributions take a variety of forms including fiction and nonfiction and cover topics ranging from sand dunes to sand mining, from seaside stories to shoreline architecture, from sand grains to global sand movements, from narratives of the setting up of bed and breakfasts to stories of seaside decline. Often a symbol of aridity, sand is revealed in this book to be an astonishingly fertile site for cultural meaning.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction: Sandscapes
• 2. Tide Wrack and Sand
• 3. An Eclectic A–Z of Sand: Removing, Treasuring, Recreating and Protecting
• 4. An Englishwoman’s Home Is Her Castle: Social Morphologies and Coastal Formations
• 5. Sands, Good Sands, Excellent Sands: Writing and Ranking the British Coastline in the Middle of the Twentieth Century
• 6. Queer Sands: Passion and Dynamic Sexualities in the Edwardian Sandscape
• 7. On the Sound-Sea: Fifteen Ways of Thinking About Sand and Sound
• 8. Rough and Smooth Sands: Social Thresholds and Seaside Style
• 9. A Morecambe Mystery
• 10. Map of the Quick
• 11. “Over Sands to the Lakes”: Journeys Over Morecambe Bay Before and After the Age of Steam
• 12. Sands Immense: A Fool’s Errand
• 13. Confounding Cartography: The Sandscape Diminution of Hayling Island
• 14. Drifting in a Cemetery of Sandscapes
• Back Matter