ABSTRACT
English-language geographical work with literary texts has traditionally concentrated on representation, focusing on setting, plot, and description in the novel. Geographers have looked at the insights fiction provides into real-world geographies, the fictional worlds that stories generate, the location of plot events, and the ways in which places, regions, and landscapes have been depicted. 1 Work in the histories of science and of the book meanwhile has concentrated on issues of publication, dissemination, and reception, with an emphasis on the geography of textual communities. 2 So far, however, not much attention has been paid to the ways in which the reading process itself might be understood as a spatial practice. The purpose of this chapter is therefore to suggest some of the ways in which geographers might think of the novel as a relationally generated event in itself, constantly emerging and re-emerging at the intersection of social practices and geographical contexts.
