Dr Leo Mellor speaks at the University of Regensburg on June 7th: The Apocalyptic Pastoral: Richard Jefferies’ After London; or Wild England (1885)

“Overgrown Court” by Kurayba is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.

Dr Leo Mellor will speak at the University of Regensburg on June 7th on: ‘The Apocalyptic Pastoral: the significance of Richard Jefferies’ After London; or Wild England (1885). The lecture traces a strand of British literature and art in the twentieth-century, one which used the visionary nature of Jefferies’ thought experiment and imagined other cities ‘enjungled and engulfed’ – a state caused by the collapse of society and the spread of resurgent plants. Such fantasies of verdant revenge (which oscillate between plausibility and fantasy, as well as sour misanthropia and wild pantheism) shaped heterogenous works such as Edward Thomas’ essays, Rose Macaulay’s The Pleasure of Ruins, John Wyndham’s The Day of the Triffids, and Clive King’s Stig of the Dump.

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