ABSTRACT
Literature in the broad sense is written material: it includes everything from handbills and newspapers to collected poems and the contents of scientific journals. In geography, it includes the topographical poem and the regional novel as well as the works of academic geographers. The relationship between art and science is much clearer in the sister discipline of sociology. Literary compositions provide the geographer with evidence of how persons in the past and in other cultures perceive reality. An important stylistic difference between literary and nonliterary compositions lies in their degree of explicitness. A literary work implies, even when it appears to be simply stating; whereas a scientific work, with its narrowly defined goal, should only attempt to state. The social scientist can learn to ask questions and formulate hypotheses from literary works, which are often highly venturesome "thought experiments". The geographer must consider both psychic time and calendar time, both "points of view" and objective reality.
