ABSTRACT

Narratives of place link people and geographic location with a cultural imaginary through literature and visual narration. Contemporary literature and film often frame narratives with specific geographic locations, which saturate the narrative with cultural meanings in relation to natural and man-made landscapes. This interdisciplinary collection seeks to interrogate such connections to probe how place is narrativized in literature and film. Utilizing close readings of specific filmic and literary texts, all chapters serve to tease out cultural and historical meanings in respect of human engagement with landscapes. Always mindful of national, cultural and topographical specificity, the book is structured around five core themes: Contested Histories of Place; Environmental Landscapes; Cityscapes; The Social Construction of Place; and Landscapes of Belonging.

chapter |3 pages

General Introduction

part II|3 pages

Environmental Landscapes: Constructing and Consuming Nature

chapter 4|16 pages

Tasmania

Australia’s Cinematic Landscape of Loss
Edited BySteven Allen

chapter 6|15 pages

Walking the Mythical Path

Thoreau’s Old Marlboro Road

part III|3 pages

Cityscapes: Movements, Ideology, and Discourse

chapter 7|14 pages

The Country, the City, the Sea, and Girls with Green Eyes

The Films of Desmond Davis and Edna O’Brien

chapter 8|13 pages

Singing about the City

Imaginations of the City in Telugu Film Songs

chapter 9|14 pages

The Dao of the East-West City

Globalizing Identities and Urban Harmonies in Xiaolu Guo’s Literature

part IV|3 pages

The Social Construction of Place: Meaningful Imaginaries

chapter 10|14 pages

Contested Spaces

Adichie, Lahiri, and the Politics of Belonging

chapter 11|13 pages

Vertical Heterotopias

Territories and Power Hierarchies in Tosh Gitonga’s Nairobi Half Life

chapter 12|14 pages

Ideologically Charged Urban and Rural Places in American Movies about HIV/AIDS

Social Constructionism and the Cultural Imaginary in the Late Twentieth Century

part V|3 pages

Landscapes of Belonging: Nation and Identity

chapter 13|14 pages

Between Place and Non-place

Disrupting the Categorizations of the Past in Ida

chapter 14|14 pages

Home and the Range

On the Concept of Home in Annie Proulx’s Wyoming Stories

chapter 15|14 pages

Narratives of Water

Changing Places and Contested Spaces in Swedish Literature