A Poetics of the North: Visual and Literary Geographies

Abstract

In this chapter we explore different media in our approaches to the North, including a pair of linked television plays presented under the title The Price of Coal (Ken Loach, 1977), written by Barry Hines; these are alongside two literary texts, Philip Hensher’s 2008 novel, A Northern Clemency , and David Peace’s GB84 of 2004. We argue that a dynamic poetics of the North emerges as both an aesthetic trend and a critical tool when viewed within such cross-medium understandings of region. The notion of a poetics of the North might appear to be a contradictory one, given critical assumptions about the region’s associations with a realist form and its accompanying bleak social and political content. However, as Katherine Cockin has argued, the North ‘generates oxymoron or paradox, a tension between desolation and depth, defying the literal and logical and intimating the poetic powers of the unconscious’ (Cockin, 2012: 5–6). Here, we use the apparently archetypal examples of television drama and fiction, which centre on representations of the mining industry in the South Yorkshire region in order to argue against such a polarised view. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

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