Thesis title:
Stories in Stones: Mines, Memory and the Geological Imagination in the Anthropocene
This creative and critical thesis consists of a novel, The Unconformities, and three critical chapters examining the folllowing:
- Consideration of the position of the coalscape in literature, and accurate geographical and geological detail about spoil heaps, coal mines and their reclamation following mine abandonment.
- Examination of geological time as viewed in literature (from Verne to Atwood and Byatt), and analysis of how these writers utilised the human lifespan against the non-human (geological) subsurface material.
- Discussion around alternative uses of the subsurface mine in the Anthropocene in literature, including novels by Haigh (Heat and Light) and Goldschmidt (Shocked Earth) concerning fracking and the geological imaginary.
The Unconformities – a novel.
‘Unconformities are gaps in the geological record,
physical evidence of breaks in time.’
Hugh Raffles,
The Book of Unconformities: Speculations on Lost Time (2020)
The novel is about enduring friendship through childhood and the affect of a devastating pit-tip slide onto a colliery village in the UK Midlands. The story begins in 1976 heatwave and moves through the period of the Miners Strike and subsequent colliery closure. Ultimately the protaganist returns to her village in the twenty-first century as part of a fracking team, which is where the conflict peaks.
In the novel it is the chronology and sense of time which is ethereal and unreliable rather than the narrator. The return to and reuse of the underground coalmine references renewal and deep-time, the climate emergency, and the grief suffered from the loss of important places (solastagia) against the frailty and transience of a human life-span.
Research Area
- Creative Writing
- Languages and Literature
