The Significance of Cumbria in Sarah Hall’s First Novel, Haweswater

Études Britanniques Contemporaines

关键词: Hall (Sarah);    Cumbria;    cultural landscape;    Lake District;    place-myth;    Haweswater;   

DOI  :  10.4000/ebc.4887

来源: DOAJ

【 摘 要 】

In an interview from 2013, Sarah Hall declared: ‘Every writer has a tic, a first port of call and for me it’s the landscape’. Born and raised in the Lake District, she has set her novels partly or wholly in Cumbria. This paper focuses on Sarah Hall’s first novel, Haweswater, and how it sowed the seeds of her literary appropriation of her native region as a cultural landscape whose historical, geological, political and cultural strata she knowingly brings into play to depict the identity conflicts at work in it. Haweswater focuses on a rural community inhabiting a dale in remote Westmorland in 1936 whose place will be flooded by the building of a reservoir. Her work makes extensive use of spatialisation issues as the land disputes mirror the individual battle within larger collective political conflicts. She sets her story against the backdrop of Cumbria as a place-myth contextualized through the dissemination of multiple discrete references to its founding conflicting images. In her first novel, Sarah Hall develops her characteristic signature as a landscape artist.

【 授权许可】

Unknown