A geography of ghosts: the spectral landscapes of Mary Butts

Abstract

The paper considers the writings of Mary Butts (1890Butts ( -1937 to explore a geography of ghosts. After examining earlier geographical engagements with the spectral and magical, and outlining the terms of recent scholarly debate concerning spectrality, the paper introduces Butts' life and work, focussing on her ghostly writings in stories, novels, journals, autobiography and an essay on the supernatural in fiction. Butts' discussion of magic and place, and her accounts of the landscapes of Dorset and west Cornwall, demonstrate a version of spectral landscape conveying enchantment, secret meaning and a culturally select geography. The paper concludes by considering Butts in relation to current discussions of spectral geography.

The enchanted path: magic and modernism in psychogeographical walking

“…The focus of this work on popular forms opens out many novel areas of inquiry, but tends to bypass modernism's long and complex relationship with the magical. The value of turning our attention to modern artists and writers is intimated in Matless's () studies of modernist mysticism and, more pointedly, by the growth of inter‐disciplinary work on magical modernism (discussed in the next section). In geography, these themes have also been brought into conversation in Fenton's account of the surrealist artist Jean‐Pierre Le Goff's attempt to reveal ‘the city's cryptogram’ (2005, 412) through a circular 12‐point walk in Paris, ‘backward’ around the clock.…”

Conceptualising ‘shadow landscape’ in political ecology and rural studies

“…For instance, research by Weinstock (2004) on the spectral turn (or 'shadowy third') sought to assimilate social representations about the 'rural' to the analysis of intertwined but spatially diffuse myths and identities. Here, one aim was to uncover the 'secret' meanings and culturally distinctive geographies of 'magic' landscapes (Matless, 2008).…”

“…Going well beyond other descriptors such as 'spectral landscapes' (Weinstock, 2004;Matless, 2008) or 'the dark side of the landscape' (Barrell, 1980) which at best describe only very partially the sorts of rural areas and associated human-environmental dynamics of concern herein, this concept encompasses the four key elements noted above (i.e. marginality, scale, socio-nature, cultures of depopulation) even as it seeks to describe how, together, these elements are more than the sum of their parts.…”

Towards a cultural geopolitics: on the making of a documentary-poetry film about a post-conflict place

“…We are undertaking a kind of visual criticism, but not one 'disciplined' by any nameable theory or methodology, treating the films as a site of research in which we are situated and implicated after watching. As in much other phenomenological landscape geography (Dubow 2001(Dubow , 2011Wylie 2002Wylie , 2005Wylie , 2007Lorimer 2003Lorimer , 2006Lorimer , 2012Edensor 2005Edensor , 2008Daniels 2006Daniels , 2012Pearson 2006;DeSilvey 2007DeSilvey , 2010DeSilvey , 2012Matless 2008Matless , 2010Matless , 2014Lorimer & Wylie 2010;Rose 2012;Riding 2015aRiding , 2015bRiding , 2016bRiding , 2017b, the films analysed here, are treated not as a spatial gaze or a representational schema, overarching and constructing the traumatised landscape, rather they are considered as presentations that are 'in and of the world' (Dewsbury et al 2002). For the films Stuart Laycock made, demand us to simultaneously tighten our point of view and widen our point of view (Didi-Huberman 2008, 41).…”