'Eating Gull Since Friday': Estuary Grotesque, Seaside Noir

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Platt, Len. 2016. 'Eating Gull Since Friday': Estuary Grotesque, Seaside Noir. Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, 58(1), pp. 1-11. ISSN 0011-1619 [Article]

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Official URL: http://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/SmeS3p6JDu8JGfDJ...

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This essay identifies a contemporary form, “estuary grotesque,” which is placed in the larger context of the postmodern, the cosmopolitan, and the post-cosmopolitan. Examining the writing of representative figures such as Nicola Barker, Ian Sinclair, Jonathan Meades, David Seabrook, and Cathi Unsworth, it constructs contemporary writing about the Thames estuary in terms of a relational metropolitanism. This “London” perspective is connected to literary forms of the past —pastoral, gothic, modernist, and so on—but represents a new turn, an Othering geographic that reconvenes the “condition of England” in terms of the marshlands, industrial detritus, and social deprivation of the Thames Estuary.

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Article