ABSTRACT
Distinctive locales, regions, landscapes, or other pertinent geographical features are often crucial to the meaning and the effectiveness of literary works. Generally speaking, space and spatiality, like time and temporality, have always been part of literature and literary studies. The variety of work likely improves the prospects for richer, more interesting ways of seeing and reading which are made possible by this renewed and heightened attention to literary spatiality. Spatial literary studies offers an approach to literary and cultural texts that emphasizes the relations between space and writing, offers a new perspective that seems particularly momentous in the twenty-first century, as borders and boundaries seemed to be transgressed, erased, redrawn, or reconceived almost daily. Spatial literary studies would have to include not only the sort of work done by critics employing geographical science or focused on a particular place, but also those working with spaces or places in a more figurative sense.
