Narratives

Wayfarings

The Collected Works of Kenneth White

Volume 4

The Book

2025

Narrative
23,4 x 15,6 cm
368 pages
Harcover
ISBN10: 9781399531382
Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

Brings together three of Kenneth White’s travel books to provide an accessible introduction to the project of ‘geopoetics’ and to White’s environmental aesthetics

• Each book presents a development of White’s underlying philosophy (geopoetics) in an accessible form, from its origins in the 1970s (The Blue Road) to its fulfilled version in The Winds of Vancouver
• – The Blue Road has become a much travelled ‘tourist’ route in Canada as a result of White’s influence
• – Guido’s Map explores the relationship between ‘Euroland’, the contemporary commercial environment’ and what ‘Europe’ has meant, especially to writers and artists, in the past and what it could mean again in the future
• – The Winds of Vancouver is an exploration of the historical circumstances of Western imperialism in North America, and a journey to the Alaskan wilderness following in the tracks of pioneering environmentalist John Muir

Kenneth White (1936–2023) established his reputation as a poet, essayist and travel writer in France in the 1970s and 80s, having left Britain in 1970. He became Professor of Twentieth-Century Poetics at the Sorbonne in 1983 and founded the International Institute of Geopoetics in Paris in 1989. The three books in this volume are what he came to describe as ‘waybooks’, accounts of travels designed to confront the reader with the condition of the modern world and, through their invocation of the notion of geopoetics, to reveal what might lie beyond its familiar limits.

Publisher’s presentation, see Contents.