"Isolarion" takes its title from a type of fifteenth-century map that isolates an area in order to present it in detail, and that's just what James Attlee does here for Cowley Road in Oxford. The former site of a leper hospital, a workhouse, and a medieval well said to have miraculous healing powers, Cowley Road has little to do with the dreaming spires of the tourist's or student's Oxford.From a sojourn in a sensory-deprivation tank to a furtive visit to an unmarked pornography emporium, the sharp-eyed Attlee investigates every aspect of the Cowley Road's appealingly eclectic culture, where halal shops jostle with craft jewelers and nightclubs pulsate alongside quiet churchyards.Drawing inspiration from sources ranging from Robert Burton's "The Anatomy of Melancholy" to contemporary art, Attlee is a charming and congenial guide who revels in the extraordinary embedded in the everyday. "Isolarion" is at once a road movie, a quixotic stand against uniformity, and a rousing hymn in praise of the complex, invigorating nature of the twenty-first-century city.
- ISBN10 6611959068
- ISBN13 9786611959067
- Publish Date 1 April 2007 (first published 7 March 2007)
- Publish Status Active
- Out of Print 2 October 2012
- Publish Country US
- Imprint University of Chicago Press
- Format eBook
- Pages 297
- Language English