Recovering Thomas Anstey Guthrie Genre and Geography (1856–1934): genre and geography

Following the publication of his first and most successful novel, Vice Versâ; or, a Lesson to Fathers (1882), Thomas Anstey Guthrie (“F. Anstey”) was plunged into an elite literary and social world, one within which he became recognised – first and foremost – for this comic fantasy narrative. This thesis asks how we might look beyond this lasting association to recover and reassess an extensive and varied career, one which was eclipsed by its best-known novel. In doing so, it offers itself as a critical research tool that (re)positions Guthrie amongst the literary landscape of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century as a literary geographer; a writer interested in the representation of the real and conceptual spaces and places contained within his texts.

The geographies discussed in the following chapters each imagine an interaction between the real and the fantastical. Such boundary-breaches and hybridities frame a discussion on how and for what purposes these encounters take place. The project argues that they meet in complex and confusing ways to imagine, explore, and represent the concrete and abstract sites within which they occur. These conceptualisations consequently serve to construct several spatial representations that enable Guthrie to reveal the instability and disorder of the real and the conceptual spaces and places of lived experience.