Page "Psychogeography" Paragraph 19

Psychogeography also become a device used in performance art and literature.

In Britain in particular, psychogeography has become a recognised descriptive term used in discussion of successful writers such as Iain Sinclair and Peter Ackroyd and the documentaries of filmmaker Patrick Keiller.

The popularity of Sinclair drew the term into greater public use in the United Kingdom.

Though Sinclair makes infrequent use of the jargon associated with the Situationists, he has certainly popularized the term by producing a large body of work based on pedestrian exploration of the urban and suburban landscape.

Sinclair and similar thinkers draw on a longstanding British literary tradition of the exploration of urban landscapes, predating the Situationists, found in the work of writers like William Blake, Arthur Machen, and Thomas de Quincey.

The nature and history of London were a central focus of these writers, utilising romantic, gothic, and occult ideas to describe and transform the city.

Sinclair drew on this tradition combined with his own explorations as a way of criticising modern developments of urban space in such key texts as Lights Out for the Territory.

Peter Ackroyd's bestselling London: A Biography was partially based on similar sources.

Merlin Coverley gives equal prominence to this literary tradition alongside Situationism in his book Psychogeography ( 2006 ), not only recognising that the situationist origins of psychogeography are sometimes forgotten, but that via certain writers like Edgar Allan Poe, Daniel Defoe and Charles Baudelaire they had a shared tradition.

Psychogeography, as a term and a concept, now reaches more British eyes than ever before, as novelist Will Self had a column of that name which started out in the British Airways Inflight magazine and then appeared weekly in the Saturday magazine of The Independent newspaper until October 2008.