1Issues of place, space and environment are central to the Société des Études Anglaises Contemporaines, whose works in the past few years have critically added to a better understanding of the spatial turn that started in the 1980s by focusing on themes such as elsewhere (2008), the horizon (2011), ruins (2013), the imaginaries of space (2014), confluences (2017), landscapes and cityscapes (2018), urban crises (2022), and fault lines (2023). Among this massive production, one critical gap remained to be filled—cardinal points in the literary imagination. Therefore, the 2023 SEAC conference, which took place at the Université de Lille, focussed on the ways North, South, East, and West are imagined, told, and written in contemporary British poetry, on the ways these stabilising coordinates participate in destabilising aesthetics.

2Indeed, from an astronomical point of view, the cardinal points are necessary for human beings to find their bearings and orientation in the world. These regulatory benchmarks function as a trope in children’s literature as the refrain in Margaret Wise Brown’s North, South, East, West (2017) shows. Yet, a quick look at a dictionary will prove that the cardinal points bear a semantic load that prevents any definitive meaning. This is reflected in the language itself, be it French or English: if you are about to ‘perdre le nord’, you run the risk of ‘être à l’ouest’; while if you are ‘too far north’, ‘to go west’ is not inevitable; conversely, to ‘head south’ may take you ‘east of Eden’, which is not so bad, because ‘à l’ouest, rien de nouveau’. . . It should come as no surprise then that, “from east to west”, British writers and artists redefine the cardinal points in their writings, especially since they are tightly connected with the notion of regionality, question the preconceived ideas that underpin the use of these landmarks in the collective imagination, and look for lines of flight away from the gridded maps drawn by these coordinates. One such example is provided by literary experiments with psychogeography, defined by Guy Debord as ‘the study of the precise laws and specific effects of the geographical environment, whether consciously organised or not, on the emotions and behaviour of individuals’ (8), and illustrated, though in quite different ways, by such authors as Peter Ackroyd, Will Self and Iain Sinclair.

3Besides, even the very number of cardinal points is debatable. Indeed, not only does the compass rose show a myriad of intermediate directions, but the zenith and the nadir may also be considered as cardinal points that constitute a third dimension (Unsöld et al. 8). Michel Viègnes, in Imaginaires des points cardinaux (2005), wonders about the inclusion of a sixth point in this system: ‘Is the center . . . a distinct direction, or should it be seen as the primary omphalos from which the quaternity of directions unfolds, like the quinta essentia which contains the four elements in their undifferentiated state?’ (Viègnes 8; my translation). With the word omphalos, Seamus Heaney’s ‘Mossbawn’ in Preoccupations (1980) immediately springs to mind:

I would begin with the Greek word, omphalos, meaning the navel, and hence the stone that marked the centre of the world, and repeat it, omphalos, omphalos, omphalos, until its blunt and falling music becomes the music of somebody pumping water at the pump outside our back door. It is Co. Derry in the early 1940s. (Heaney 3)

4The centre of the world plays its music at the poet’s door and is evocative of a whole area and era. So much so that the word omphalos was used as a touchstone for The Poetry Society in 2016 to bring together texts by poets from very different regions such as Colette Bryce, Bhanu Kapil, or Simon Armitage.The centre is central, but not fixed, and its existence can lead to de-centred or eccentric poetics as Sam Trainor shows in his contribution on Roy Fischer’s works on the Midlands.

5Be they four, five or more, the cardinal points work as springboards for the imagination to unfold, or for ‘paysages moralisés’ to take up Edwin Panofsky’s phrase mentioned in Farah Nada’s contribution. Auden’s moral compass serves as a fitting example:

North—cold, wind, precipices, glaciers, caves, heroic conquest of dangerous production, privacy. South—heat, light, drought, calm, agricultural plains, trees, Rotarian crowds, the life of ignoble ease, spiders, fruits and desserts, the waste of time, publicity. West and East are relatively neutral. West is more favourable, i.e., more northern, but conjures up the unheroic image of retired couples holding hands in the sunset; East is definitely southern and means dried figs and scorpions. (Auden 335)

6When erected as a system, the cardinal points provide a division of the world that has been slowly constructed and has become immediately recognizable by the reader, as Cécile Beaufils shows in the case of new nature writing which ‘eschews parochialism’ to ‘provide a new form of orientation for the readers.’ Some genres rely heavily on such associations. To take but one example, playwrights like Alan Bennett, Shelagh Delaney, Andrea Dunbar, Peter Flanery, John Godber, Lee Hall, Alan Plater have contributed to depict a North of England that is steeped in working-class culture, social realism, and the reversal of stigma, a gritty spirit also synthesised in Antony Gormley’s monumental sculpture ‘The Angel of the North’. Conversely, fantasy and science fiction create imaginary worlds that draw heavily on the representations of the North, the South, the East and the West, as evidenced by The Chronicles of Narnia, Northern Light, Lord of the Rings or even Game of Thrones. Travel literature also uses the cardinal points as emblems of regions to (re)discover other places while dystopian fiction uncovers them, as in Orwell’s 1984 which divides the Eastern and Western blocs of the Cold War into three fluctuating federations dependent on temporary alliances.

7Therefore North, South, East and West come with different sets of images that evolve in time and through art. So much so that Pascale Tollance calls them ‘floating signifiers’ in her contribution. This fluidity makes them hard to pin on a map, geographically and symbolically, especially when losing one’s bearings may be a way towards oneness with the environment, as Fiona McCann suggests in her article. Another moot point is that of the size of the regions labelled after cardinal points (from the Global North to South London) and the borders of said regions, where everything is a matter of perspective. For instance, the North is an administrative region of England; it is also Scotland, north of England; it is a cultural region inherited from Northumbria; it is also a vast northern basin that includes the Scandinavian countries. More importantly, from an ecological perspective, cardinal points are ‘deeply-entrenched and anthropocentred, deictic bearings’, to use Sarah Jonckheere’s words, that become semantically void as soon as a multi-scalar temporality is reckoned with.

8Regions are not just relative or perceptual; they are also relational. Indeed, North, South, East and West can only be understood in relation to each other. Thus, in his preface to The South Country (1909), Edward Thomas clarifies the region he is going to poeticise: ‘The name is given to the south of England as distinguished from the Midlands, “North England”, and “West England” by the Severn. The poet is thinking particularly of Sussex and of the South Downs’ (Thomas 1). They are often reduced to a notional pairing based on a radical antagonism, which is exemplified by the ‘North-South divide’ which became conceptually popular thanks to Elizabeth Gaskell’s 1854–1855 novel. The OED describes the northern countries as ‘the industrially and economically more developed countries of the world, typically located to the north of the less industrialized nations’ and the southern countries in diametrically opposed terms: ‘The countries of the southern hemisphere, viewed as industrially and economically less developed than those of the northern hemisphere; the developing world.’ In much the same way, the East can be considered as a figment of western imagination (and vice versa).

9These ‘imaginative geographies’ raise the question of the polarisation of regions (which is structuring in D. H. Lawrence’s Women in Love and Ford Madox Ford’s Provence, and which is deconstructed in Ayub Khan-Din’s East is East and its sequel West is West, or in Salman Rushdie’s East, West for example), and their use in inducing Othering devices. Such polarisation can also be challenged by the search for new arrangements, as in Brian Chikwava’s Harare North, in which London and Zimbabwe are basically the same place for those who experience migration (errare). This dual construction of spaces is at the heart of Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978) and postcolonial literature, but also of decolonial thinking that tries to go beyond the polarities which imply a hierarchy of values.

10Because the literature dealing with North, South, East and West highlights the sociological and historical roots of the representations of these regions, they also question the system of literary representation itself as well as its cultural and political foundation. Language is therefore central: what does the reader hear, phonetically and symbolically, when the narrator or a character speaks a regional variety of English? What does the West sound like? Performing a text in reading adds extra layers of meaning as Alice Braun, Claire Hélie, and Sam Trainor show in their collaboration on Liz Berry’s accent-inflected poetry.

11To analyse these political, cultural and literary constructions, criticism is rife with neologisms (nordicity, westerness, orientalism, the Global South, to name but a few) which aim to go beyond the supposedly essentialising nature of the cardinal points. The literature dealing with North, South, East, and West is metatextual in nature (it is not cynical to say that all the regions of the world have been mapped out and written up by now). It is also ‘palimpsestic’ (it unearths the layered meanings of the coordinates from the past) and ‘palimpsestuous’ (it weaves new readings into the fabric of the text for the present), to take up the distinction Georges Letissier uses in his contribution. This collection of eight articles for Études britanniques contemporaines addresses some of these issues.

12Pascale Tollance, in ‘The “Temptation of Indifference” and the Search for an Elemental South in A.S. Byatt’s “Crocodile Tears” (Elementals)’, focusses on the North-South polarity, and on how it is created only to be disrupted. Indeed, in the short story, the main character flees to the elemental South where the sun makes it all white and seems to erase the traumatic death of her husband in England. In Nîmes, she meets a man from further North, a Scandinavian, who will take her away from this place of dissolution and help her cope with her mourning process. The polarised geography is soon to be disturbed by the introduction of the spectral and the hybrid, prompted by a chance encounter with a crocodile that reminds her of a line from Shakespeare’s Anthony and Cleopatra—another polarized pair—in which her late husband played a role. The character’s apparent indifference to her experience is thus challenged by enmeshed differentials.

13In ‘“We’re going north”: Motion and Destination in Elizabeth Bowen’s To the North’, Farah Nada shows that the North in Bowen’s novel and oeuvre is plural, standing for the Arctic, Northern Ireland and the North of England, with ideas of dearth and death, cold and whiteness attached to this unknown and unchartered region of the mind. The author analyses how a journey northwards articulates different conceptions of these Norths and becomes a metaphor for the narrative itself, since the end of the novel seems to never fully materialise. Following Ian Davidson’s Idea of the North and a wide array of books on cultural geography, Nada argues that the North is not only a geographical anchorage with a specific ‘lexicon of northerness’, but also a direction, always receding further away as we near it, an ‘indeterminate elsewhere’.

14In his article on Roy Fisher’s poetry, Sam Trainor claims that the position of the Midlands is problematic due to the enduring myth of the North-South divide. Paradoxically, its centrality in Fisher’s poetics does not lead to liminality but to marginality and indeterminacy. The poet discards the concept of an authentic local identity in favour of defamiliarising strategies that renew conceptions of place, subject and language. One such strategy is the multifocal treatment of deixis, a linguistic concept used to state that the demonstrative references in an utterance are positioned in relation to an implicit singular centre (for instance ‘here and there’ are indexed by the position of the speaker), and more particularly the metaphorical use of ergativity, another linguistic concept, according to which the poetic subject becomes ‘the object forged by the act of perception’. Reading a few poems closely, Trainor delineates the ‘ethical eccentricity’ of the Midlands in Fisher’s poetry.

15In ‘All around the Wrekin: The Midlands as (m)otherland in Liz Berry’s poetry’, Alice Braun, Claire Hélie, and Sam Trainor analyse how Berry’s matriarchal mapping of the Midlands ‘veers’ (a concept coined by Nicholas Royle) away from a mimetic, stabilising cartography of the place’s industrial and patriarchal heritage to experience defamiliarisation and make the unheimlich her new home. Indeed, the poet opens lines of flight that take her towards new territories, upwards and northwards, through a becoming-bird, a becoming-mother, and maybe a becoming-performer. Besides, these lines of flight are not just geographic, or even existential, but they are also prosodic: the close study of some of her performances shows an increasing tendency towards the use of ‘winglet words’, a rising intonation that is close to what Alan Cruttenden analyses as a prosodic characteristic of northern cities.

16Georges Letissier’s ‘The Cardinal Points of Robert Macfarlane’s Palimpsestuous Walking’ also begins with the Midlands, or more precisely with Robert Macfarlane’s reading of George Eliot and her configuration of the region as middle, middling and middleness, which the writer uses as a subtext for his own North. Letissier argues that the North is a set of mind that extends beyond the cardinal points and challenges preconceived ideas of language—it is experiential. Given the highly politicised nature of the coordinates (their projection on space is a sign of hegemony), Macfarlane is looking for counter-mapping strategies that offer an escape from a regulatory space—following elements instead of the Ordnance Survey Map for guidance, experimenting with biogeography and plunging into deep time are three examples of these defamiliarising tactics. Focussing on the North as a site to witness ecological disasters past, present and future, Letissier introduces Glen Albrecht’s concept of solastalgia and Jacques Derrida’s hauntology to develop some of the ethical questions raised by Macfarlane in the age of the Anthropocene.

17In ‘Due North? British nature writing prizes: reworking cardinal points in contemporary British nature writing’, Cécile Beaufils traces the emergence of new nature writing, a genre which has consistently mapped out the land and asserted clear landmarks since the 1970s and whose figurehead may be Robert Macfarlane. She takes into account the ‘network of institutional tastemakers’, literary prizes in particular, which act as prescriptive authorities on the market and orient future developments in the genre. The author notes that besides challenging pastoral and conservative tropes and conventions to make the genre more inclusive, the two novels she focusses on, Marchelle Farrell’s Uprooting and James Rebanks’s English Pastoral, both use structuring spatial markers (toponyms, institutional landmarks, dialecticisms. . .) to explore complicated constructs like home, belonging and community, and ward off the disorientation induced by the COVID-19 crisis and globalization.

18In ‘Bearing(s) in Life Writing by Caro Giles and Kerri Ní Dochartaigh’, Fiona McCann compares and contrasts two memoirs dealing with northern bearings: Giles’s Twelve Moons: A Year Under A Shared Sky and Ní Dochartaigh’s Cacophony of Bone, both published in 2023, in which two women, disoriented by the Covid-19 crisis and past traumatic events (a difficult separation and the Troubles) try to make a new home for themselves in Northumberland and Northern Ireland respectively. They are struggling to find their bearings in their new environment through connection with the non-human—the sea, the fauna, the moon, and this ‘sympoiesis’ (‘making with’ according to Haraway) allows them to feel untethered and reconfigure their own coordinates. Their search for a sense of belonging leads them to retrieve the language lost in trauma, a metaphor for the loss of biodiversity they witness. The author concludes on how their northern trajectories delineate an ethics of care in the Anthropocene.

19Sarah Jonckheere gives Nicholas Royle’s Mother: A Memoir (2020) a close reading from an ecocritical perspective to demonstrate that the destabilisation of spatial markers such as the four cardinal points has equivalents on larger scales. Starting from the desemanticisation of the trope of the west as the direction towards betterment as experienced by Royle when moving west from London, Jonckheere then focusses on the landslip, a geological feature characteristic of the West Country where one always runs the risk of losing one’s bearings. Using Timothy Clark’s definition of ‘scale effects’ in Ecocriticism on the Edge and a close reading of an excerpt from Royle’s text, she shows that the local is attuned to the planetary and that different temporalities (that of the eulogised mother, of the Romantic Mother Nature and of the ecological Mother Earth) are interwoven, destabilising anthropocentric conceptions of confined space, linear time and the human/non-human divide.

20In conclusion, not only do these eight contributions on the North, South, East and West use a wide range of critical tools to analyse direction and regionality in contemporary British literature, but they also map out new territories for investigation. We certainly hope that readers will find this issue as magnetic as the North is said to be.