Alexandra Harris

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The Rising Down (MP3-Download)

Lives in a Sussex Landscape Ungekürzte Lesung. 903 Min.

Sprecher: Harris, Alexandra

Beschreibung

This luminous chronicle of lives in an English landscape over time is a feat of time travel from the prize-winning author of Romantic Moderns and Weatherland. An ancient church sheltering a medieval anchorite who chose to be buried alive. The country estate parading a menagerie of exotic animals. The cottage where William Blake received the poetic spirit of Milton. A safe house harbouring secret agents from wartime French resistance networks. When the celebrated critic and cultural historian Alexandra Harris returned to her childhood home of West Sussex, she realised that she barely knew the place at all. As she probed beneath the surface, excavating layers of archival records and everyday objects, bringing a lifetime's reading to bear on the place where she started, hundreds of unexpected stories and hypnotic voices emerged from the area's past. Who has stood here, she asks; what did they see? From the painter John Constable and the modernist writer Ford Madox Ford to the lost local women who left little trace, these electrifying encounters - spanning the Downs, Poland, Australia, Canada - inspired her to imagine lives that seemed distant, yet were deeply connected through their shared landscape. By focusing on one small patch of England, Harris finds 'a World in a Grain of Sand' by opening vast new horizons, becoming our intimate companion as we travel on visionary journeys through space and time. The result is a masterpiece of 'scholarship at its life-enhancing best' (Independent) which reveals that nowhere is simply one place :and gives us all new bearings.

Autor

Alexandra Harris is an acclaimed writer, literary critic and cultural historian. She was educated at the University of Oxford and the Courtauld Institute and worked for ten years at the University of Liverpool. She is now Professor of English at the University of Birmingham. Romantic Moderns: English Writers, Artists and the Imagination from Virginia Woolf to John Piper (2010) won the Guardian First Book Award, a Somerset Maugham Award and was shortlisted for the Duff Cooper Prize. Weatherland: Writers and Artists Under English Skies (2015) was shortlisted for the Ondaatje Prize, longlisted for the Wainwright Prize and adapted for BBC Radio 4. A Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, Harris reviews for the Guardian and other newspapers, writes for exhibition catalogues, works with artists and lectures widely.

Produktdetails

• Verlag: Faber & Faber
• Erscheinungstermin: 28. März 2024
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN-13: 9780571392032
• Artikelnr.: 70017988