Lyme Regis Revisited: The Geological Landscape in Joan Thomas’s Curiosity, A Love Story
Set in the small Dorset town of Lyme Regis in the first decades of the nineteenth century, Curiosity by Canadian writer Joan Thomas has its foundations in the literary deposits that have constituted Britain’s coastal landscape into a cultural monument. Leaving behind retrospection, one of the ploys...
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| Format: | Article |
| Language: | English |
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Presses Universitaires de la Méditerranée
2018-12-01
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| Series: | Études Britanniques Contemporaines |
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| Online Access: | http://journals.openedition.org/ebc/4663 |
| Summary: | Set in the small Dorset town of Lyme Regis in the first decades of the nineteenth century, Curiosity by Canadian writer Joan Thomas has its foundations in the literary deposits that have constituted Britain’s coastal landscape into a cultural monument. Leaving behind retrospection, one of the ploys favoured by the sentimental novel to secure the illusion that the past can be recuperated and reconciled with the present, Curiosity opts instead for a geological logic of interruption as memories of the past breach into the unfolding of its narrative. Thomas’s reading of the local geology exposes the distant colonial landscapes that haunt her characters’ present as much as the canonical novels that have been looking out at the world from Lyme Regis’ Cobb. My paper will be relying upon Georges Didi-Huberman’s critique of visibility to analyse the novel’s revisiting of a thick, multi-layered landscape streaked with the affects of suppressed histories. |
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| ISSN: | 1168-4917 2271-5444 |