This thesis concerns the practice of ‘psychogeography’ in London, England, and the ways in which psychogeographic writings provoke in city-dwellers an acute sense of disorientation, as though the everyday were otherworldly. My study is intended as a response to Guy Debord’s claim that ‘psychogeography’ investigates “the precise laws […] of the geographical environment” on “the emotions and behaviour of individuals” (Debord qtd. in Coverley 88): any revolutionary enterprise must point to the future, the very notion of which can only be imprecise and un-empirical – psychogeography is not necessarily an exception. I argue that for Alan Moore and Iain Sinclair, the psychogeographic imperative is rather to imagine the implosion of Londonscape as it is well known, since only spatial structures that thus unravel may offer mystical insights that are, as yet, unspoiled by neoliberal/Thatcherite politics and the accompanying ambition to re-vamp English history in a nostalgic light. This study presents psychogeography not simply as a strategy of political resistance but as a visceral and metaphysical experience; it draws upon SF theories of worlding and the philosophical notion of Dasein to address some concerns that have arisen in post-imperial Britain, such as the desire to define English identity, i.e., ‘Englishness.’ / Thesis / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) / This dissertation studies Alan Moore’s and Iain Sinclair’s use of psychogeography to examine the city of London. Psychogeography is an implosive, fragmented writing style that estranges the meaning of the urban everyday. Subject to psychogeographic depiction, London becomes a city altogether foreign, if not to say fantastical. I argue that psychogeography is both a strategy of political resistance and a visceral experience – one that could influence common ways of reading English history and culture (i.e. ‘Englishness.’)

This thesis explores a contemporary literary movement that has been called ‘the new nature writing’, framing it in its wider historical and cultural context of the last forty years. Drawing on recent developments in cultural geography, it explores the way such terms as ‘landscape’ and ‘place’ have been engaged with and reinterpreted in a diverse project of literary re-mapping in the British and Irish archipelago. It argues that the rise of environmentalism since the late 1960s has changed and destabilised the way the British and Irish relate to the world around them. It is, however, concerned with challenging the term ‘nature writing’ and argues that the literature of landscape and place of the last forty years is not solely concerned with ‘nature’, a term that has come under some degree of scrutiny recently. It sets out an argument for reframing this movement as an ‘archipelagic literature’ in order to incorporate the question of community. In understanding the present uncertainties that pervade the questions around landscape and place today it also considers the effects of such political changes as the partial devolution of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland on the British and Irish relationship to the land. The literature that it takes as its subject often explores the way personal and communal senses of identity have found a renewed focus in a critical localism in opposition to more footloose forms of globalisation. Through a careful negotiation of Marxist and phenomenological readings of landscape, it offers an overview of what is a considerable body of literature now and what is developing into one of the most consistent and defined literary movements of the twenty-first century.