Spatial Literary Studies: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Space, Geography, and the Imagination(Routledge Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Literature)

Following the spatial turn in the humanities and social sciences, Spatial Literary Studies: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Space, Geography, and the Imagination offers a wide range of essays that reframe or transform contemporary criticism by focusing attention, in various ways, on the dynamic relations among space, place, and literature. These essays reflect upon the representation of space and place, whether in the real world, in imaginary universes, or in those hybrid zones where fiction meets reality. Working within or alongside related approaches, such as geocriticism, literary geography, and the spatial humanities, these essays examine the relationship between literary spatiality and different genres or media, such as film or television. The contributors to Spatial Literary Studies draw upon diverse critical and theoretical traditions in disclosing, analyzing, and exploring the significance of space, place, and mapping in literature and in the world, thus making new textual geographies and literary cartographies possible.

Introduction. Spaces of the Text: Literary Studies after the Spatial Turn

Robert T. Tally Jr.

Part I. Geocritical Theory and Practice

1. Geocriticism at a Crossroads: An Overview

Mariya Shymchyshyn

2. How to Do Narratives with Maps: Cartography as a Performative Act in Gulliver’s Travels and Through the Looking Glass

Emmanuelle Peraldo and Yann Calbérac,

3. Beyond Binaries and Metaphor: The Counterhegemonic Possibilities of Place

Jessica Maucione

Part II. Geographies of the Text

4. Mallarmé, Poet of the Earthly World: On Spatiality in L’Après midi d’une Faune

Rogério de Melo Franco

5. Zola’s Spatial Explorations of Second Empire Paris

Julia Kröger

6. "Dr. Livingstone, I Presume?": The Demonic Grounds of M. NourbeSe Philip’s Looking for Livingstone: An Odyssey of Silence

Kate Siklosi

7. Rethinking the Beginning: Toni Morrison and the Dramatization of Liminality

Michelle Dreiding

8. "You’ve been here before?": Space and Memory in Stephen Poliakoff’s Dramas

Elizabeth Robertson

Part III. Geography in the Text

9. Caves as Anti-Places: Robert Penn Warren’s The Cave and Cormac McCarthy’s Child of God

Ralph Crane and Lisa Fletcher

10. A Geocritical Approach to the Role of the Desert in Penelope Lively’s Moon Tiger and Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient

Sarah Ager

11. Isolated Spaces, Fragmented Places: Caryl Phillips’s Ghettoes in The Nature of Blood and The European Tribe

I. Murat Öner

12. The Eternal Return and the Country/City Dynamic in Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being

Adam McKee

13. Transgression, Boundaries, and Power: Rethinking the Space of Postcolonial Literature

Dustin Crowley

Part IV. The Problematics of Place

14. "Oh, man, I’m nowhere": Ralph Ellison and the Psychospatial Terrain of Mid-Century Harlem

Walter Bosse

15. Covington is the Non-Place for Me: Walker Percy’s Topophilia in the Deserts of Theory and Consumption

Chris Margrave

16. Alfred Hitchcock’s The Rear Window: Cold War, Spatiality, and the Paranoid Subject

Beatrice Kohler

17. Locating the Clearing: Contested Boundaries in Toni Morrison’s Beloved and Song of Solomon

Will Cunningham

18. Remapping the Present: Dave Eggers’s Spatial Virtuality and the Condition of Literature

Nathan Frank

Part V. Plus Ultra

19. Spatial Literary Studies versus Literary Geography?: Boundaries and Borders amidst Interdisciplinary Approaches to Space and Literature

Robert T. Tally Jr.