Island Thinking
Suffolk Stories of Landscape, Militarisation and Identity
Authors: Davis, Sophia
Free Preview- Explores the imaginative appeal of Britain as an island, feeding narratives of isolation and separation
- Focusing on coastal Suffolk, the book uses a regional study to unravel the motif of the island, alternately zooming in to Suffolk and out to the nation
- Creates a thickly textured picture of landscape and history, through interweaving natural history, literary history, and military history
- Connecting local issues to broader themes, the author takes the reader on a tour through the history of English countryside, nature conservation, and national heritage, as well as episodes connecting science and warfare, and the militarization of landscape
- Draws on a wide range of rare source material, including countryside guides, fiction, local oral histories, archive material in natural history, memoirs, interviews, and the author’s own impressions of the landscapes
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- About this book
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Island Thinking is a cultural historical and geographical study of Englishness in a key period of cultural transformation in mid-twentieth century Britain as the empire shrank back to its insular core. The book uses a highly regional focus to investigate the imaginative appeal of islands and boundedness, interweaving twentieth-century histories of militarisation, countryside, nature conservation and national heritage to create a thickly textured picture of landscape and history. Referred to as an ‘island within an island’, Suffolk's corner of England provides fascinating stories displaying a preoccupation with vulnerability and threat, refuge and safety. The book explores the portrayal of the region in mid-century rural writing that ‘rediscovered’ the countryside, as well as the area’s extensive militarisation during the Second World War. It examines various enclosures, from the wartime radar project to ‘make Britain an island again’ to the postwar establishment of secluded nature reserves protecting British birds.
- About the authors
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Sophia Danielle Davis completed her Ph.D. at the University of Cambridge in the History and Philosophy of Science, and was subsequently a research scholar at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin.
- Table of contents (8 chapters)
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Island Stories
Pages 1-29
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Secluded Suffolk: Countryside Writing, c.1930–1960
Pages 31-71
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Invaded Island: Wartime Enclosures and Post-war Memories
Pages 73-114
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Looking to the Skies: Post-war Radar Stories
Pages 115-159
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Birds and Belonging: The Return of the Avocet, 1947–1969
Pages 161-197
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Table of contents (8 chapters)
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Bibliographic Information
- Bibliographic Information
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- Book Title
- Island Thinking
- Book Subtitle
- Suffolk Stories of Landscape, Militarisation and Identity
- Authors
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- Sophia Davis
- Copyright
- 2020
- Publisher
- Palgrave Macmillan
- Copyright Holder
- The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd.
- eBook ISBN
- 978-981-13-9676-2
- DOI
- 10.1007/978-981-13-9676-2
- Hardcover ISBN
- 978-981-13-9675-5
- Edition Number
- 1
- Number of Pages
- XIII, 302
- Number of Illustrations
- 15 b/w illustrations, 17 illustrations in colour
- Topics
