ABSTRACT
From the perspective of geographers, the linking of geography and literature is not new (Pocock; Noble and Dhussa; Brosseau; Caviedes; Lando; Sharp; Hones). Although not the first to explore the geography embedded in literature, H.C. Darby, in 1948, was amongst the first geographers to examine a canonical literary landscape – Thomas Hardy’s Wessex – and to emphasise the role of locality and place in literature. Darby claimed his work was merely an intellectual exercise. Yet, today, it can be seen as foundational, since the geographical exploration of literature with its integrated triad of person, plot and place, is now an essential subfield of human geography (Thorpe; Pocock; Brosseau). Whereas the emergence of structuralism in the 1950s and 1960s emphasised the role of literature as a resource for the social sciences (Brosseau), these early forays into literary geography were limited or unidirectional both because of the perception by geographers that literary works were highly subjective and because of the lack of a nuanced appreciation of spatiality amongst literary scholars. Increasingly, however, both geographers and literary scholars have come to recognise the ways in which geography and literature inform one another and how geographical setting and spatial behaviour contextualises and shapes our understanding and interpretation of authors and their works (Alves and Queiroz; Brosseau; Lucchesi; Moretti; Saunders; Yuan).
