Deep Chronotopes Map

The deep chronotopes map shows that, unusually, the novel contains all the possible chronotopes. This multiplicity is created by the novel’s dual and often contesting generic and spatio-temporal character combining: dystopian, post-apocalyptic future history, nature writing and the quest romance, while also travelling through wilderness and facing adversity in the name of love. The three dominant chronotopes – 'threshold', 'road', 'encounter' – suggest that overall After London; or, Wild England isn’t only, or even mainly, about the wild but rather the human journey through it. In the deep chronotopic map ‘wilderness’ is directly connected (via a solid purple line) to ‘anti-idyll’ registering how the world of the novel is an afterwards, an uncultivated, dehumanised landscape of empty wilderness, and, as the novel’s open and inconclusive ending registers, the idyll denied. Besides, the idyll’s pastoral impulses rely on spatial and temporal contrasts – the rural past, the urban present – whereas here London and the city is the past.