ABSTRACT
The classic studies of literary geography were concerned with the equally classic rural and, often, spatially circumscribed novels of region and of landscape, such as Thomas Hardy’s Wessex or Mary Webb’s Shropshire.1 More recently, a number of geographers, notably those who have themselves moved from one location to a distant and more or less alien ‘other’, have sought to widen the engagement between literature and geography to include a range of human experience which extends beyond attachment to and description of a single and/or singular place. In this connection Porteous2 has argued that ‘Human experience of place is one major dimension, involving the fundamental distinction of existential insider: existential outsider…Location of experience is the second major dimension, the significant antinomy being home:away.’ The matrix (Figure 2) put forward by Porteous encapsulates comparable distinctions, such as native:non-native3 and roots: rootlessness,4 which are particularly appropriate to the study of mobile, rather than static, individuals, groups and societies.
