ABSTRACT

Following the spatial turn in the humanities and social sciences, Spatial Literary Studies: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Space, Geography, and the Imagination offers a wide range of essays that reframe or transform contemporary criticism by focusing attention, in various ways, on the dynamic relations among space, place, and literature. These essays reflect upon the representation of space and place, whether in the real world, in imaginary universes, or in those hybrid zones where fiction meets reality. Working within or alongside related approaches, such as geocriticism, literary geography, and the spatial humanities, these essays examine the relationship between literary spatiality and different genres or media, such as film or television. The contributors to Spatial Literary Studies draw upon diverse critical and theoretical traditions in disclosing, analyzing, and exploring the significance of space, place, and mapping in literature and in the world, thus making new textual geographies and literary cartographies possible.

chapter |10 pages

Introduction

Spaces of the Text: Literary Studies After the Spatial Turn

part I|49 pages

Geocritical Theory and Practice

chapter 1|18 pages

Geocriticism at the Crossroads

An Overview

chapter 2|16 pages

How to Do Narratives With Maps

Cartography as a Performative Act in Gulliver’s Travels and Through the Looking-Glass

chapter 3|13 pages

Beyond Binaries and Metaphor

The Counterhegemonic Possibilities of Place

part II|86 pages

Geographies of the Text

chapter 4|20 pages

Mallarmé, Poet of the Earthly World

On Spatiality in L’Après-midi d’un Faune

chapter 6|14 pages

“Dr. Livingstone, I presume?”

The Demonic Grounds of M. NourbeSe Philip’s Looking for Livingstone: An Odyssey of Silence

chapter 7|13 pages

Rethinking the Beginning

Toni Morrison and the Dramatization of Liminality

chapter 8|17 pages

“You’ve been here before?”

Space and Memory in Stephen Poliakoff’s Dramas

part III|79 pages

Geography in the Text

chapter 9|15 pages

Caves as Anti-Places

Robert Penn Warren’s The Cave and Cormac McCarthy’s Child of God

chapter 11|16 pages

Isolated Spaces, Fragmented Places

Caryl Phillips’s Ghettos in The Nature of Blood and The European Tribe

chapter 13|20 pages

Transgression, Boundaries, and Power

Rethinking the Space of Postcolonial Literature

part IV|88 pages

The Problematics of Place

chapter 14|11 pages

“Oh, man, I’m nowhere”

Ralph Ellison and the Psychospatial Terrain of Mid-Century Harlem

chapter 15|15 pages

Covington Is the Non-Place for Me

Walker Percy’s Topophilia in the Deserts of Theory and Consumption

chapter 16|16 pages

Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window

Cold War, Spatiality, and the Paranoid Subject

chapter 17|17 pages

Locating the Clearing

Contested Boundaries in Beloved and Song of Solomon

chapter 18|27 pages

Remapping the Present

Dave Eggers’s Spatial Virtuality and the Condition of Literature

part V|17 pages

Plus Ultra

chapter 19|15 pages

Spatial Literary Studies Versus Literary Geography?

Boundaries and Borders Amidst Interdisciplinary Approaches to Space and Literature