"Pan" and the open road

Greenslade, William

Abstract

While the mythologising of nature in British writing at the end of the long nineteenth century has been often regarded as nostalgic, escapist and evasive, this chapter argues that such writing found in the cult of ‘Pan’ and ‘The Open Road’ imaginative resources for resisting the modernising of Britian through a symbolic geography which was furtively, sometimes openly, disruptive. Whether in the form of pagan mysticism or of romantic pedestrianism, the cult of nature observed by writers such as R. L. Stevenson, Kenneth Grahame, Edward Thomas and E.M Forster, celebrated forms of redundancy, eccentricity and sheer uselessness. These values were prized as inimical to the rapid modernising of Britain into a mass, industrial society and to the problematic project of national regeneration, grounded in social utility and eugenic thinking which was taking shape in the early twentieth century.

• Publication Date: Jul 5, 2000
• Deposit Date: Nov 20, 2023
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Pages: 145-161
• Book Title: Outside Modernism: In Pursuit of the English Novel, 1900-1930
• Chapter Number: 8
• ISBN: 9780333794135
• Keywords: Pan The Open Road R.L. Stevenson, E.M. Forster, Kenneth Grahame, , Edward Thomas
• Public URL: https://uwe-repository.worktribe.com/output/11456727
• Publisher URL: https://link.springer.com/book/9780333794135
• Additional Information: Volume edited by Lynne Hapgood and Nancy L. Paxton
• Contract Date: Nov 1, 1997