Literary Geography

Literary Geography provides an introduction to work in the field, making the interdiscipline accessible and visible to students and academics working in literary studies and human geography, as well as related fields such as the geohumanities, place writing and geopoetics. Emphasising the long tradition of work with literary texts in human geography, this volume: provides an overview of literary geography as an interdiscipline, which combines aims and methods from human geography and literary studies explains how and why literary geography differs from spatially-oriented critical approaches in literary studies reviews geographical work with literary texts from the late 19th century to the present day includes a glossary of key terms and concepts employed in contemporary literary geography. Accessible and clear, this comprehensive overview is an essential guide for anyone interested in learning more about the history, current activity and future of work in the interdiscipline of literary geography.

This reference investigates the role of landscape in popular works and in doing so explores the time in which they were written. Literary Geography: An Encyclopedia of Real and Imagined Settings is an authoritative guide for students, teachers, and avid readers who seek to understand the importance of setting in interpreting works of literature, including poetry. By examining how authors and poets shaped their literary landscapes in such works as The Great Gatsby and Nineteen Eighty-Four, readers will discover historical, political, and cultural context hidden within the words of their favorite reads. The alphabetically arranged entries provide easy access to analysis of some of the most well-known and frequently assigned pieces of literature and poetry. Entries begin with a brief introduction to the featured piece of literature and then answer the questions: "How is literary landscape used to shape the story?"; "How is the literary landscape imbued with the geographical, political, cultural, and historical context of the author's contemporary world, whether purposeful or not?" Pop-up boxes provide quotes about literary landscapes throughout the book, and an appendix takes a brief look at the places writers congregated and that inspired them. A comprehensive scholarly bibliography of secondary sources pertaining to mapping, physical and cultural geography, ecocriticism, and the role of nature in literature rounds out the work.

Combining literary analysis with a practical introduction to interdisciplinary literary geography, Literary Geograp hie s examines key elements of Colum McCann's 2009 novel, Let the Great World Spi n . Hones examines concepts such as narrative space, literary and academic collaboration, and the geographies of creation, production, and reception.

Combining literary analysis with a practical introduction to interdisciplinary literary geography, Literary Geograp hie s examines key elements of Colum McCann's 2009 novel, Let the Great World Spi n . Hones examines concepts such as narrative space, literary and academic collaboration, and the geographies of creation, production, and reception.

This interdisciplinary collection of essays explores intersections between geography and American literary history, from the earliest geographic chronicles of the New World to the massive geopolitical transformation of the 1890s. Foregrounding the unsteady nature of geographical boundaries, the physical and imaginary migrations that coexisted with literary nationalisms, and changing attitudes toward geographical settings, these essays present alternatives to exceptionalist accounts of U.S. culture. The focus on literary and discursive settings addresses social and political developments such as imperialism, regionalism, and tourism. This book contributes to literary histories by emphasizing spatial over temporal frameworks as organizing principles or telling the story of American literature.

'Smith’s investigation focuses rigorously on the aesthetic complexities of these texts to demonstrate how, in a way even the authors themselves sometimes do not suspect, new ways arise of understanding their power of eco-criticism. [...] Smith’s contribution is this call, like few today, to awaken new energies in the literary and cultural criticism about the Amazon precisely because she has her feet grounded in the harsh history of the region, while her eyes are focused on different future possibilities for the region.' Felipe Martínez-Pinzón, ReVista

For Miguel de Cervantes, to narrate a Mediterranean experience is to necessarily speak of an emotional experience. Affective Geographies takes as its point of departure the premise that literature is as influential in constructing the Mediterranean as are its geographic, climatic, or economic features. As the writer with the most vast and varied Mediterranean experience of his era, Cervantes is exceptionally well-suited for the critical task of recovering the literary Mediterranean. Engaging with the interdisciplinary fields of Mediterranean studies, affect theory, and the history of emotion, Paul Michael Johnson reads Cervantes’s texts alongside the affective structures that inscribe the Mediterranean as a space of conflict, commerce, expansion, and empire. In particular, he argues that Cervantes’s writing, with its uncommon focus on the Moorish, Islamic, and North African experience, can serve to realign misconceptions about the Mediterranean we have inherited today. Affective Geographies proposes that, with a more than four-hundred-year history of impacting the hearts and minds of readers, Cervantes’s works constitute a literary longue durée, ramifying beyond fiction to alter the popular imaginary and long-term cultural landscape.

In a period marked by the Spatial Turn, time is not the main category of analysis any longer. Space is. It is now considered as a central metaphor and topos in literature, and literary criticism has seized space as a new tool. Similarly, literature turns out to be an ideal field for geography. This book examines the cross-fertilization of geography and literature as disciplines, languages and methodologies. In the past two decades, several methods of analysis focusing on the relationship and interconnectedness between literature and geography have flourished. Literary cartography, literary geography and geocriticism (Westphal, 2007, and Tally, 2011) have their specificities, but they all agree upon the omnipresence of space, place and mapping at the core of analysis. Other approaches like ecocriticism (Buell, 2001, and Garrard, 2004), geopoetics (White, 1994), geography of literature (Moretti, 2000), studies of the inserted map (Ljunberg, 2012, and Pristnall and Cooper, 2011) and narrative cartography have likewise drawn attention to space. Literature and Geography: The Writing of Space Throughout History, following an international conference in Lyon bringing together literary academics, geographers, cartographers and architects in order to discuss literature and geography as two practices of space, shows that literature, along with geography, is perfectly valid to account for space. Suggestions are offered here from all disciplines on how to take into account representations and discourses since texts, including literary ones, have become increasingly present in the analysis of geographers.