Midland : A novel out of time
- Submitting institution
-
The University of Manchester
- Unit of assessment
- 27 - English Language and Literature
- Output identifier
- 64189939
- Type
- A - Authored book
- DOI
-
-
- Publisher
- Penned in the Margins
- ISBN
- 9781908058232
- Open access status
- -
- Month of publication
- October
- Year of publication
- 2014
- URL
-
-
- Supplementary information
-
-
- Request cross-referral to
- -
- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
- -
- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- No
- Number of additional authors
-
0
- Research group(s)
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A - SALC
- Proposed double-weighted
- Yes
- Double-weighted statement
- 'Midland’s' distinctive literary attention to a regional rather than metropolitan city required extensive multidisciplinary research including visits to archives in both Birmingham and Montreal, where the author looked at the Canadian Centre for Architecture’s holdings of James Burgoyne’s photographs taken on commission from the city’s nineteenth-century ‘Improvement Committee’. The research also incorporated cinema history (the beginnings of the ODEON in Birmingham), industrial history (from pen nib production to motorway construction), urban planning and architecture, linguistic studies of dialect, and labour history in relation to gender. The author also incorporated research on the Birmingham Surrealist movement.
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- Shortlisted for the 2015 Gordon Burn Prize, which rewards writing that challenges perceived notions of genre and demonstrates ‘innovative literary methods’, 'Midland' is an experimental novel that narrates and re-imagines the twentieth-century transformations of the city of Birmingham, UK. Its structuring principle is the construction and partial dismantling of the Inner Ring Road, originally planned by Herbert Manzoni (who in the novel becomes ‘Humphrey Manzino’) and continually encountered and navigated in 'Midland' by three female protagonists: the bab, the WW, and Rita. Unnamed in the novel itself, Birmingham is nonetheless both a setting and character, with one of the chapters narrated by the city’s imagined ‘I’. Over the course of the three generations represented by the novel’s protagonists, the form of the city shifts dramatically, as do the narrative modes and genres that 'Midland' inhabits. Sometimes realist, sometimes Surrealist, sometimes inflected with SF and fantasy tropes, Midland is both the intimate story of a family and an imaginary city planning document – its construction was as much influenced by Cedric Price’s imaginary architecture (and his unbuilt plans for the Birmingham and Midland Institute especially) as it was by Roy Fisher’s long Birmingham poem, ‘City’ (1961).
- Author contribution statement
- -
- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
- -
