The Rising Down

Alexandra Harris

$49.99

Hardback

Forthcoming
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English

Faber & Faber
25 June 2024

History; Social & cultural history; History of ideas; The natural world, country life & pets; Local history

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' and opens 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.

By: Alexandra Harris
Imprint: Faber & Faber
Country of Publication: United Kingdom
Edition: Main
Dimensions: Height: 240mm, Width: 165mm, Spine: 30mm
Weight: 809g
ISBN: 9780571350520
ISBN 10: 0571350526
Pages: 512
Publication Date: 25 June 2024
Audience: General/trade , College/higher education , Professional and scholarly , ELT Advanced , Primary
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Forthcoming

Alexandra Harris is an acclaimed writer, literary critic and cultural historian. She was educated at the University of Oxford and the Courtauld Institute and 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 longlisted for the Wainwright Prize, shortlisted for the Ondaatje Prize, adapted for BBC Radio 4 and chosen ten times as a 'Book of the Year'. A Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, Harris reviews for the Guardian and other newspapers as well as judging literary prizes, writing for exhibition catalogues, working with artists, lecturing widely and speaking on the radio. www.alexandraharris.co.uk'A joy to read.' Sunday Times 'Breathtaking.' Guardian'Highly eclectic and original.' Sunday Telegraph'Hugely ambitious.' TLS 'The wit and wonder of an exceptional literary work.' New Statesman 'An inspiring guide.' Daily Mail