Bruce Chatwin, On the Black Hill

Richard Utz (Georgia Institute of Technology)

The Literary Encyclopedia. Volume 1.2.1.09: English Writing and Culture: Postwar and Contemporary Britain , 1945-present.
Vol. editors: Kerry Myler (Newman University), Jenni Ramone (The Nottingham Trent University)

Dates

First circulation or publication 1982

Places

England (Country of Origin)

Genres and Modes

Novel

Resources

In this novel, published in 1982 and written in the tradition of Thomas Hardy and D. H. Lawrence, Bruce Chatwin revives the almost forgotten genre of the pastoral, introduces readers to the Welsh-English border country, and follows the lives of identical twins, Benjamin and Lewis Jones, who have been born in 1900 and have been sleeping in their parents' bed for 42 years. On the Black Hill is a chronicle of the Jones twins' lives, beginning with the courtship and marriage of their parents to the death, at the age of 80, of Lewis. Influenced by the tensions between their parents — a literate, imaginative, and well-traveled mother (Mary), a missionary's daughter, and a sedentary, bad-tempered, and rather inarticulate father (…

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627 words

Citation: Utz, Richard. "On the Black Hill". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 17 January 2001 [https://staging.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=3066, accessed 26 November 2024.]

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