British Psychogeographical Fiction

Abstract

[eng] Psychogeographical fiction is characterized by the expression of the influence of geographical spaces upon the minds of the characters. These places are in most cases cities, frequently London or New York, but a few novels employ also rural settings or enclosed locations. The works of Iain Sinclair have acquired a substantial following precisely for their focus on his peculiar brand of psychogeography, which has been described in a variety of ways. In Dorian, an Imitation, Will Self's protagonist walks London and Los Angeles, but in his case in search of propitiatory victims for his sexual voraciousness. Self exacerbates the darkness of Oscar Wilde's Victorian Gothic London by translating it into the 1980s. According to Will Self, J.G. Ballard ‘is the purest psychogeographer, ever dissolving the particular and the historical in the transient and the psychic’ and turning ‘states into states of mind’.