Vision & Revision: Post-Romantic Particularism and Poetic Cognition in the Journals of RF Langley and JA Baker

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This thesis proposes to take the relationship between vision and revision as a lens through which to read the journalpractises of RF Langley, JA Baker and others. It aims to subtilise a loosely-constituted history of journal and essaywriting that 'includes Dorothy Wordsworth, Ruskin, Hopkins, and Adrian Stokes', by reframing these journals, and theirconcern both with the observation of nature and with the nature of observation, in the context of biogeographicalfieldwork and 'field notes'. Read thus, these texts can be said to destabilise the conventions of the journal form, locatingin it a particular experimental space somewhere between field journal, diary and poem, in which modes of poeticperception, articulation and cognition can be trialled, scrutinised, edited and expurgated. This thesis will be grounded inarchival study and informed by a Heideggerian theoretical framework, drawing also on the phenomenology of Jean-LucMarion, and recent developments in Cultural Geography and experimental criticism. It will show these texts to have animportant contemporary significance both in their illumination of the approaches and agitations of recent place-writing,and in their relevance to urgent questions about the ethics of attention in the context of environmental degradation.