Literary Geography Research Papers - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

Almost 30 years after the publication of Gianni Celati's Verso la foce the aim of our presentation is to
develop the concept of the river Po as a “liquid chronotope” (Conte 2008, Bauman 2000, Bakhtin
1975) that works both on the metaphorical-narrative and the physical-geographical level. On the one
hand the river Po works as a narrative line and guides Celati's narration replacing the structuring
function of the plot; on the other hand it represents a geographical element that orients both the
narrator's and our perfomative tour through the “new Italian landscape”.

- by Giada Peterle and +1
- •
- Geography, Human Geography, Photography, Performance Studies

My contribution today is titled Walking with buildings. The flâneur and the (im)mobilizing power of non-human narrators and aims to reflect on the contrasting encounter between the apparent immobility of buildings, as non-human inert bodies, and the peculiar mobility of the flâneur. I said apparent immobility because my provocation starts precisely from the idea that buildings, despite their inertia, have an intrinsic power to mobilize our gaze and move our feet: my proposal is to imagine them as non-human narrators that invite the flâneur to move in the city both vertically, discovering changes in time, and horizontally, exploring connections in space. Furthermore, as (im)mobile concrete archives, buildings invite us to reflect once again on the peculiarity of the flâneur’s mobility, which is made of a constant alternation between walking and resting, listening and writing practices. Even if always on the move, the flâneur constantly takes time for slow practices like resting, reflect and writing, thus resisting through his own body to the rapid flows of contemporary cities and neoliberal rhythms.
I will explore these suggestions by proposing three examples: first, a graphic novel by Will Eisner published in 1987 and titled "The building"; second, "Living with buildings and walking with ghosts" the latest work by the well-known psychogeographer Iain Sinclair, which appeared in 2018 and became also an exhibition; third, a personal flânerie in the Brutalist Robin Hood Gardens Estate, that I’ve realised in February 2019 while I was living in Tower Hamlets, East London. Following Sinclair’s exploration, I will focus on brutalist estates as architectural bodies that have peculiar stories to tell thanks, to their controversial and critical position in contemporary London as in many other cities. But, How can we listen to voices of buildings, interpreting them as non-human narrators that keep stories hidden in them? Furthermore, “is there a link between the walking and storytelling practice of the flâneur and the encounter with the (im)mobilities
of buildings?”

- by Giada Peterle
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- Cultural Geography, Architecture, Comics Studies, Literary Geography
- by ABDUL AIJAZ
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- Space and Place, Literary Geography, Ecocriticism, Edward Said

This short piece explores the social and situated practices of collectively negotiating speculative fiction over video conferencing software across different time zones. It builds on recent calls for a reinvigorated cultural sociology of reading that is attentive to how ‘the very exposure through fictional texts to the plurality of the human condition, its vulnerability and its strengths, opens up for readers the possibility of conceiving and making sense of change in themselves and their situation’ (Thumala Olave, 2018: 449). Through an attentiveness to the knowledge production of readers, it is a modest addition to recent work which seeks to explore the relationship between speculative climate fiction and political change (Milkoreit 2016; Schneider-Mayerson, 2018; Harris, 2020; Yazell 2020). In exploring how readers seek out and engage with utopian and critically dystopian fictions that nourish the capacity for individual and collective resistance and struggle, this piece - and the wider project it is part of - seeks to ground some of the claims made by science fiction scholars, about the radical potential of sf (see Moylan, 2000, Jameson, 2005) by attending qualitatively to ordinary reading practices. I cautiously suggest that this creative, collaborative, caring sf reading practice constitutes a form of ambiguously hopeful sustenance. It builds on recent research with online sf reading communities which is interested in how reading and discussing speculative fiction online is generative for collectively negotiating radically altered presents and futures (see Chambers and Garforth, 2020; Iossifidis 2018 a, b and Iossifiids and Garforth, forthcoming).

- by Miranda Iossifidis
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- Cultural Studies, Cultural Sociology, Literary Geography, Utopian Studies

In fantasy literature, the setting is as important to the story as are character and plot. This article demonstrates how topofocal (place-focused) perspectives yield valuable insights into various fantasy texts. The examples include discussions on how the nature/culture relationship is tied to the ideological centre in Charles de Lint’s Newford stories; how a careful examination of Sauron’s land in J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings reveals how the text views the nature of evil; and how the structure of the land develops along with the stories in the Mythago Wood novels by Robert Holdstock. In a genre where there are no limits to the shape a setting can take, the central question must be: Why is it shaped the way it is?

- by Stefan Ekman
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- Literary Geography, J. R. R. Tolkien, Fantasy Literature, Ecocriticism
- by Ralph Crane and +1
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- Romanticism, Nineteenth Century Studies, Space and Place, Island Studies
- by Joe Galbo
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- Intellectual History, Cultural Geography, Italian (European History), Italian Studies

This article discusses how utopian and anti-utopian literatures offer alternate visions to find connecting links between the control of space, power and happiness. The focus is on three classics of utopian and dystopian literatures: Thomas More's Utopia (1516), Aldous Huxley's Brave New World (1932), and George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949). Through the analysis of these works it is pondered how utopian and anti-utopian societies offer freedom or restrict inhabitants moving and acting in their worlds, and how this is portrayed as a means to measure the quality of life. The article contributes to socially critical literary geography by envisioning various options to imagine the relationship of space and power. The starting presumption in the article is that both utopian and anti-utopian imaginations suggest that freedom to use space is a key factor when defining human happiness.

- by Juha Ridanpää
- •
- Human Geography, Cultural Geography, Social Geography, Dystopian Literature
- by Elena Dai Prà
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- Geography, Literature, Literary Geography, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
- by Dr Thomas Bristow
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- Scottish Literature, Literary Criticism, Literary Geography, Ecocriticism

Drawing on the expertise of leading researchers from around the globe, this pioneering collection of essays explores how geospatial technologies are revolutionizing the discipline of literary studies. The book offers the first intensive examination of digital literary cartography, a feld whose recent and rapid development has yet to be coherently analysed. This collection not only provides an authoritative account of the current state of the feld, but also informs a new generation of digital humanities scholars about the critical and creative potentials of digital literary mapping. The book showcases the work of exemplary literary mapping projects and provides the reader with an overview of the tools, techniques and methods those projects employ.

ABSTRACT
This article investigates how Gabriele D’Annunzio’s The Triumph of
Death brings together Nietzsche’s ideas and Wagner’s music and
interweaves them with the motifs of literary Decadence and the
author’s own particular sexual politics. The novel is an experimental
text striving to be a Gesemtkunstswerk, an integrated work that
incorporates music, painting, poetry, regional folklore, and private
thoughts about personal and national power. I discuss the novel’s
themes of violent sexuality and the anxiety of powerlessness and
explore their implications for the fascist political aesthetics in which
D’Annunzio played a pioneering role.

- by Joe Galbo
- •
- Critical Theory, History, European History, Intellectual History
- by Elizabeth Leane
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- Literary Geography, Literature and Geography, Geocriticism, Fiction

The entry begins with a definition of geography and with a description of what the discipline shares with the other social sciences and what makes it distinctive among them. Terminological clarifications are provided with regard to the relationship between human geography and physical geography, and between human geography and urban geography. After a brief history and overview of human geography’s engagement with social theory, the entry offers a discussion of the politicization of contemporary human geography and of how this phenomenon is reflected in theory building and concept development.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1002/9781118430873.est0464

- by Dragos Simandan
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- Critical Theory, Discourse Analysis, Landscape Ecology, Sociology
- by James Tyner
- •
- Cultural Studies, Geography, Human Geography, Cultural Geography

The Routledge Handbook of Literature and Space provides a comprehensive critical overview of the latest advancements in the arena of spatial literary studies. Its primary questions move along the avenues opened up for literary criticism by the ‘spatial turn’ in cultural studies and the humanities in general. The investigations illuminate key concerns regarding the reciprocal relationships between spatiality and the human senses, their production of spatial and social relations, as well as an interpretation of space as a fluid dimension constantly in a state of becoming. The contributions present thoroughgoing analyses of a wide array of literary texts from diverse historical and geographical settings, and frequently evidence the profound impact that recent phenomenological and New Materialist bents have exerted on literary study. Expansive in scope and content, yet incisive and approachable, the volume should find both novices and experts, from the full range of disciplines that it engages with, among its reading public.

This book provides a political and geographical history of how boglands (or peat ‘bogs’) are represented in modern and contemporary Irish literature and culture from the 1880s to the present. Bogs are more than ubiquitous landforms in Ireland. They function as a kind of narrative that reveals some of the potentially unanswered questions in an Irish literary geo-history, particularly leading up to and during the Land Wars of the 1880s, Irish War of Independence (1919-1921), ‘Troubles’ (1960s and 1970s), Celtic Tiger (1990s and 2000s), and into the current environmental crisis. The overlap of the ‘postcolonial’ and the ‘Gothic’ – across ecological, spatial, social, and gender approaches – serves as an effective way to address some historical layers and apparent contradictions in literary representations of bogs in Ireland. Drawing on a range of Irish writers, including Bram Stoker, Frank O’Connor, Sean O’Faolain, Daniel Corkery, Seamus Heaney, Marina Carr, Deirdre Kinahan, Patrick McCabe, and Tim Robinson, Contentious Terrains ultimately argues that the destabilising and haunting capacities of the bog provide a space to explore historically fraught colonial tensions and social struggles through the Gothic form. It employs a cross-disciplinary scope, examining an assortment of Irish writers in the literary genres of fiction, poetry, drama, and non-fiction, thus testifying to the pervasiveness and range of the bog’s allure in Irish culture.

- by Derek Gladwin
- •
- Postcolonial Studies, Literary Geography, Gothic Literature, Ecocriticism

This study aims at using literary mapping as a part of the interpretation of literary texts rather than using it as a metaphor. Spatial and temporal structures of a plot and the internal logic of narrative highlight interrelations between time and place in literary works since both history and geography shape the narrative structure of the novel. Mai ve Siyah (1896-97; “The Blue and the Black”) raises major questions about the relations of time, space and (Imperial) power, and how they influence literary forms and styles. Mapping Istanbul in the novel allows a deeper comprehension of the condition of art and literature, the press, and the publication culture in the Ottoman Empire in the late nineteenth century. The depiction of Babıâli Street reveals its major position as the cultural centre for the press, publishing and literary circles in the capital. The novel also portrays the physical and intellectual environment of Tepebaşı and Beyoğlu districts and highlights the Western culture of Istanbul. The timeline of the plot denies linearity and it is dynamic with a retrospective narrative. Mapping representational (and non-represented) spaces in the novel further help us get a better grip on the wider implications of the commodification of art and literature on the period.

The project of literary cartography is fraught with peril, as the urge to produce accurate maps confronts the specters of not only the impossible, but the undesirable. As with Borges’s fabulous geographers who developed a perfectly useless map coextensive with the territory it purported to depict, such mimetic scrupulosity thwarts the project of literary cartography as well. The hero’s itinerary is traced along the map that is formed, at least in part, by those itinerant tracings, while the epic narrative gives shape to the world’s spaces. Like Odysseus, the bard who would sing the world into being must connect the itinerary to the map, blending lived experience with that imaginary geography to form a rhapsodic totality. Or like Dante, who pauses to study geography in the midst of his own infernal trajectory, the literary cartographer must construct an architectonic by which the otherworldly system can make sense, such that the spaces revealed are also the spaces produced in the narrative. Or like Ahab, whose relentless pursuit of the “inscrutable thing” at the heart of the white whale inscribes his own mission with indelible markings, as his mapping project proves wholly reflexive. In all these ways, literary cartography represents and produces a world system for the reader to explore. Drawing upon key scenes from the Odyssey, the Inferno, and Moby-Dick for this essay, Tally reflects on literary cartography by examining the interrelations among the itinerary and the map, narrative and description, perception and abstraction, lived experience and the social totality.

- by Robert Tally
- •
- Critical Theory, Homer, Marxism, Dante Studies

This article demonstrates how we can gain critical insights into a fantasy world by reading its accompanying map, using Ben McSweeney's map from Brandon Sanderson's The Rithmatist as an example. An analysis of the map's topography, linguistic signs, and surround elements is carried out in terms of Denis Wood's proposition that all maps have authors, subjects, and themes. The results show that even without reference to the text, a map can comment on the fantasy world's technological level, its colonial history, and the central conflict of the story. Interpreting the map also invites a broader examination of the relationship between the fantastical and the actual.

Al menos desde el fin de la Segunda Guerra Mundial, una sólida preocupación por el espacio ha venido a alterar decisivamente la epistemología no solo de las Humanidades, sino también de las Ciencias, trazando un puente entre ambas. El presente artículo intenta esbozar una breve Historia del giro espacial en los estudios culturales y literarios, distinguiendo, como hace Franco Moretti, entre la Historia del análisis del espacio en la literatura y el de la literatura en el espacio. En ambas vertientes, la aportación de distintas escuelas y disciplinas francesas, encabezadas por nombres como Bachelard, Lefebvre, Foucault o, más recientemente, Westphal y Pageaux, ha sido reivindicada como decisiva por multitud de autores interesados en el desarrollo último del spatial turn.
At least since the end of the Second World War, a strong concern for space has come to decisively alter not only the epistemology of the humanities, but also of sciences, drawing a bridge between the two. This paper attempts to outline a brief history of the spatial turn in cultural and literary studies, distinguishing between examining space in literature and literature in space, as Franco Moretti does. On both the contribution of various French schools and disciplines, led by names like Bachelard, Lefebvre, Foucault or, more recently, Westphal and Pageaux, has been claimed as crucial by many authors interested in the latest development of the spatial turn.

- by David Matías
- •
- Cultural Studies, World Literatures, Humanities, Literary Geography
- by Shane Andrew Magnaye
- •
- Literary Geography, Franz Kafka, Geocriticism, Albert Camus
- by Sara Luchetta
- •
- Literary Geography, Literary Cartography

This article is part of the series that analyzes by employing research methods such as distant reading and geocriticism the archive created by a team of young Romanian academics for the cultural and research project ASTRA Data Mining. The Digital Museum of the 19th Century Romanian Novel, implemented by ASTRA National Museum Complex. Our inquiry uses metadata regarding geolocations that was gathered while digitizing 157 novels published in Romania in the 19th century to bring forward their internal geographical universe and challenges the assumption that Romanian literature and especially the novel were mainly rural at the time.

- by Stefan Baghiu and +4
- •
- Data Mining, Nineteenth Century Studies, Transnationalism, Narrative

ÖZET
Sadece edebi değil; tarihî, sosyolojik, politik veya coğrafî özellikleriyle incelendiğinde edebi eserlerin pek çok farklı cephesi ortaya konulabilir. Özellikle kurgusal türlerde yazarın biyografisi ile anlatının kurgusal dünyası arasındaki paralellikleri ve kurgusal coğrafya ile gerçek coğrafya arasındaki izdüşümleri ortaya koymak, edebiyat incelemelerine önemli katkılar sağlayacaktır. Bu çalıĢmada 1952 ve 1957'de yayınlanmıĢ Dost ve Yaşamasız adlı öykü kitaplarında yer alan toplam 32 öyküden hareketle Vüs'at O. Bener'in öykücülüğünde mekânın kurgu içerisinde yeri ve bu ögenin olay örgüsü, kişiler, zaman ve anlatıcı gibi anlatı bileşenleri ile olan ilişkileri ortaya konulmaya çalışılmaktadır. Kurgusal coğrafya ile yazarın biyografik coğrafyası arasındaki paralelliklerin ortaya konulmasında disiplinler arası yöntemlerden de yararlanılan çalışmada, öykülerde kullanılan otobiyografik ögelerin sadece yazarın özyaşamından birtakım kesitler ve hatıralarla sınırlı kalmadığı; yaşanılan coğrafyaların da kurgusal dünyaya mekânsal zemin oluşturduğu sonucuna varılmıştır.
ABSTRACT
When literary works are analyzed not only as literary characteristics but also as sociological, political and linguistic geography, it can be betrayed its many different aspects. Especially, in fictional kinds; betraying the parallelism between author's biography and narration's fictional world and the projections between fictional linguistic geography and real geography will contribute to literature analysis considerably. In this work, it was tried to betray the place of the location in the fiction and its relations with the narration components as the story line, people, time and the narrator hence 32 stories in his Dost and YaĢamasız books published in 1952 and 1957. It was come to the conclusion that in this work which was benefited from the methods among disciplines in the betraying of the parallelism among fictional, biographic and physical geographies, the autobiographical items which the author used in his stories are not only limited with some sequences and memories from his private life but also his geographies which he lived, composed a spatial basic for the fictional world.

- by Ömer Solak
- •
- Literary Geography, Fictional Geography
- by Charles B Travis IV
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- Geography, Homer, Spatial Analysis, Dante Studies
- by Moh. Fahry Djuraini
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- Human Geography, Cultural Geography, Literary Geography, Geography Education
- by Moh. Fahry Djuraini
- •
- Geography, Literary Geography, Geography Education, Asessment

Scholars have long examined the relationship between literature and space, place, or mapping, but formal methods or disciplines for such work have only recently come into being. Particularly after what has been called the “spatial turn” in the humanities and social sciences, researchers from various academic and artistic disciplines have developed work in connection to such terms as literary geography, imaginative geography, geocriticism, geopoetics, the spatial humanities, geohumanities, and spatial literary studies, to name a few. Understandably, there would be a great deal of overlapping interest among these emerging practices or subfields, even if the aims and methods of each may vary, and practitioners of one form may find it desirable to distinguish their field from other related ones. Recently, a leading proponent of literary geography has sharply criticized the conflation of that field with spatial literary studies, an ostensible rival primarily associated with the work of Robert T. Tally Jr., among others. In this essay, Tally responds to this criticism, first by explaining his use and understanding of the terms spatial literary studies and literary geography, then by attempting to create a working definition that would delineate the boundaries between these practices while leaving open the possibilities for future collaboration and mutual influence.

- by Robert Tally
- •
- Critical Theory, Marxism, Space and Place, Literary Criticism

In the last 20 years, ecocriticism has developed from its early incarnation as the relatively under-theorised preserve of nature writing enthusiasts to its current vibrant state as a sophisticated array of ‘earth-centred’ approaches to cultural criticism that mobilise and reframe theories drawn from a range of disciplines in- cluding ecology, philosophy, sociology and biology. Ecocriticism’s diversity also extends to engaging with a variety of literary forms as well as, increasingly, ﬁlm, TV, digital environments and music, and to an interest in representations of the urban. At its heart is the conviction both that we are living in a time of ecological crisis that requires us to reassess with some urgency our modes of being in the world and that our cultural perceptions of ‘nature’ and the ‘human’, and the relationship between the two, have to a large
degree been responsible for these damaging modes of being. Its role is to interrogate and critique these perceptions, even within environmentalism itself, with some ecocritics also committed to exploring alternative ways of conceptualising our relationship with the non-human world. This paper brieﬂy traces the history of ecocriticism, discussing its initial development in the USA and Britain, outlining the two strands of social ecology and deep ecology that underpin its ongoing
formulation, and tracing the ‘waves’ of its development. It then focuses on contemporary and emergent theorisations, in particular the global inﬂection of current post-colonial ecocriticism and the environmental justice movement, which introduces the new paradigm of eco-cosmopolitics, and the recent formulation of ecocritical post- humanism. This emphasises the imbrication of the human in earth’s matrix, drawing on the insights of ecofeminism, phenomenology and biosemiotics, and has its most recent incarnation in the currently emerging ﬁeld of material ecocriticism, which,
in its engagement with the complex entanglement of the human and the non-human, the social and the scientiﬁc, hints at a more dissonant paradigm.

Despite its postmodern articulation, the spatial turn is productive for literary studies because, paradoxically revisiting Kant’s modern attempt to base the structure of knowledge on the presumably scientific character of geography and anthropology, it has improved methods of historical contextualization of literature through the dialectics of ontologically heterogeneous spaces. The author discusses three recent appropriations of the spatial thought in literary studies: the modernization of traditional literary geography in the research of the relations between geospaces and fictional worlds (Piatti, Westphal), the systematic analysis of the genre development and diffusion with the help of analytical cartography (Moretti), and the transnational history of literary cultures (Valdés, Neubauer, Domínguez, etc.). In conclusion, the author presents the tentative results of the research project “The Space of Slovenian Literary Culture: Literary History and the GIS-Based Spatial Analysis,” which might represent a matrix for further developments of the spatially-oriented literary science. Using GIS technologies, the project maps and analyzes data about the media, institutions, and actors of Slovenian literature in order to explain how the interaction between “spaces in literature” and “literature in spaces” has historically established a nationalized and esthetically differentiated literary field.

- by Juha Ridanpää
- •
- Geography, Popular Culture, Literary Geography

In our thesis we examine the function of the geographic area of Epirus as a literary myth in Greek prose fiction after World War II and, particularly, in the prose fiction that mythologizes the Epirotic space as birthplace. We focus on one hundred forty two texts by eight writers, who belong to the two postwar generations. In the first generation belong D. Hatzis, K. Tzallas, Ph. Tziovas and G. Dallas, while in the second T. Porfyris, Ch. Milionis, S. Stamatis and F. Moulios. Initially, most of them work as a team, being also members of the editorial committee of the literary magazine Endohora (1959-1966) of the city of Ioannina. Based on various approaches of the theory of literary space and literary myth, which are presented in the introduction, and applying the method of mapping that Literary Geography suggests, we distinguish the textual representation of the geography of Epirus into two categories: “place-setting” and “place-phantom”. In the first category we study urban (especially Ioannina) and rural areas and their symbolism, along with the value codes they carry, as the determined -directly or indirectly-topographic substrate of the text. In the second category we investigate the imaginary reconstruction of Epirus, when fiction refers to a setting far away from Epirus (such as Athens, Germany, England). We realize that the literary Epirus has a lot in common with the authors’ experience of Epirus. We also examine invisible spatial aspects: a. the historical dimension of Epirus as a war space of hostility, particularly during the 1940s; and b. the symbolizationed space of Epirus as a field of positive activity. In contrast to the war, the space is symbolized positively by the oral literature (i.e. in folk songs and legends), by the local dialect, and the local historiography. We infer that basic themes and motifs are derived from D. Hatzis and especially from The End of Our Small Town (1953, 1963), and, therefore, we emphasize his central role in the formation of post-war prose fiction of Epirotic locality.

Tesis de maestría académica en literatura latinoamericana, Universidad de Costa Rica (2016)

- by Mauricio Chaves
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- Literary Criticism, Literary Geography, Literary Theory, Julio Cortázar
- by Moh. Fahry Djuraini
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- Geography, Human Geography, Literary Geography, Geography Education

Thematic issue on travel writing seen in the perspective of Humanistic Geography

- by Bertrand Levy
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- Creative Writing, Travel Writing, Literary Geography, Humanistic Geography
- by Charles B Travis IV
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- Cultural Geography, Historical Geography, Irish Studies, Perception
- by Bertrand Levy and +1
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- Human Geography, Cultural Geography, Literary Geography, Identity (Culture)
- by Gabriele Pedullà
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- Digital Humanities, Italian Studies, Literary Geography, Italian Literature

Literary writing has operated as a space of inquiry unsettling the literal and figurative ground on which thinking takes place. From Hölderlin’s invocations to the ether, to Walter Benjamin’s characterization of Baudelaire’s poetry as unfathomable, a certain tradition of writing, particularly in German letters, takes shape around a critique of gravity. Against the background of a geopoetics, I propose to turn to the question of an inconstant and inconsistent ground in Paul Celan’s ‘geological lyric’ by explicating the relationship in his writing between the earth and its unthought other: air. This reading has as its object of inquiry what I am calling Celan’s aerography, which is doubly articulated in the turn to aerial space in his poetry and in his articulation of the work of air in those terrestrial landscapes formed and deformed by aeolian processes. I argue that the radically dissipative geographies evoked in his poems could extend critical geographic inquiry into a multiple and turbulent materiality; however, the sheer spectrality of the material world in Celan’s poetry seems to require an (a)material criticism, that is, a materiality without matter.

- by Jason Groves
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- Literary Geography, Paul Celan