Spatial Literary Studies

Spatial Literary Studies
Author: Robert T. Tally Jr.
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 292
Release: 2020-10-20
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1000208044

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.

Ecocriticism and Geocriticism

Ecocriticism and Geocriticism
Author: Robert T. Tally Jr.
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 218
Release: 2016-04-29
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1137542624

Although treated as two distinct schools of thought, ecocriticism and geocriticism have both placed emphasis on the lived environment, whether through social or natural spaces. For the first time, this interdisciplinary collection of essays addresses the complementary and contested aspects of these approaches to literature, culture, and society.

Geocriticism

Geocriticism
Author: B. Westphal
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 373
Release: 2011-05-23
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0230119166

Geocriticism provides a theoretical foundation and a critical exploration of geocriticism, an interdisciplinary approach to understanding literature in relation to space and place. Drawing on diverse thinkers, Westphal argues that a geocritical approach enables novel ways of seeing literary texts and of conducting literary studies.

Spatiality

Spatiality
Author: Robert T. Tally
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 194
Release: 2013
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 041566439X

Divided into six chapters, each dealing with different aspects of the spatial in literary studies, the book provides: An overview of the spatial turn in literary theory - from modern philosophy and historicism to cartography and literary theory Introductions to the major theorists such as Michel Foucault, David Harvey, Edward Soja, Erich Auerbach, Georg Lukács, and Mikhail Bakhtin An analysis of spatiality from a variety of perspectives - the writer as map-maker, different literary and critical 'spaces', the concept of literary geography, cartographics and geocriticism. As the first guide to the literature and criticism of 'space', this clear and engaging book is essential reading.

Geocritical Explorations

Geocritical Explorations
Author: Robert T. Tally Jr.
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 238
Release: 2011-10-03
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0230337937

In recent years the spatial turn in literary and cultural studies has opened up new ways of looking at the interactions among writers, readers, texts, and places. Geocriticism offers a timely new approach, and this book presents an array of concrete examples or readings, which also reveal the broad range of geocritical practices.

Ecospatiality

Ecospatiality
Author: Lowell Wyse
Publisher: University of Iowa Press
Total Pages: 272
Release: 2021-07-15
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1609387740

"John Steinbeck's Salinas Valley. Richard Wright's Chicago. Leslie Marmon Silko's New Mexico. Readers often have strong connections with literary places like these. And some works of literature can even change our understanding of the world we live in. But can place also change our view of literature? Site-Reading advances a place-based approach to literature, reading classic texts through the twin lenses of geographical awareness and environmental thought. This book highlights recent developments in ecocriticism and geocriticism to argue for a theory of "ecospatiality" with nature, space, and story as the three elements of place. Site-Reading reconsiders well-known works of twentieth-century American prose and shows how social and environmental issues always overlap. Travel writer William Least Heat-Moon, whose work embodies the ecospatial perspective, portrays his experiences with place on the local, regional, and continental scales. Classic novels by Silko, Willa Cather, and Ana Castillo-usually discussed in isolation-converge in a way that maps diverse cultural perspectives and environmental threats onto the shared geography of Central New Mexico. A reading of Steinbeck's Salinas Valley Watershed texts investigates the impacts of literary tourism in "Steinbeck Country" before drilling down into Steinbeck's portrayals of spatial development and environmental history. And an innovative analysis of Native Son shows how Richard Wright uses cartographic details to decry the spatial/racial politics of South Side Chicago in the 1930s. In this book, Lowell Wyse shows how place provides the grounds for both human experience and critical practice. By bringing together concepts like literary cartography, deep mapping, and bioregionalism in an "ecospatial" approach, Site-Reading not only maps new terrain between ecocriticism and geocriticism, but also shows why place matters-in the world and in the text"--

Spaces and Fictions of the Weird and the Fantastic

Spaces and Fictions of the Weird and the Fantastic
Author: Julius Greve
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 216
Release: 2019-11-18
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 3030281167

This collection of essays discusses genre fiction and film within the discursive framework of the environmental humanities and analyses the convergent themes of spatiality, climate change, and related anxieties concerning the future of human affairs, as crucial for any understanding of current forms of “weird” and “fantastic” literature and culture. Given their focus on the culturally marginal, unknown, and “other,” these genres figure as diagnostic modes of storytelling, outlining the latent anxieties and social dynamics that define a culture’s “structure of feeling” at a given historical moment. The contributions in this volume map the long and continuous tradition of weird and fantastic fiction as a seismograph for eco-geographical turmoil from the nineteenth to the twenty-first century, offering innovative and insightful ecocritical readings of H. P. Lovecraft, Harriet Prescott Spofford, China Miéville, N. K. Jemisin, Thomas Ligotti, and Jeff VanderMeer, among others.

Prospero's Daughter

Prospero's Daughter
Author: Elizabeth Nunez
Publisher: Akashic Books
Total Pages: 341
Release: 2016-10-25
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1617755427

Set on a Caribbean island in the grip of colonialism, this novel is “masterful . . . simply wonderful . . . [an] exquisite retelling of The Tempest” (Kirkus Reviews, starred review). When Peter Gardner’s ruthless medical genius leads him to experiment on his unwitting patients—often at the expense of their lives—he flees England, seeking an environ where his experiments might continue without scrutiny. He arrives with his three-year-old-daughter, Virginia, in Chacachacare, an isolated island off the coast of Trinidad, in the early 1960s. Gardner considers the locals to be nothing more than savages. He assumes ownership of the home of a servant boy named Carlos, seeing in him a suitable subject for his amoral medical work. Nonetheless, he educates the boy alongside Virginia. As Virginia and Carlos come of age together, they form a covert relationship that violates the outdated mores of colonial rule. When Gardner unveils the pair’s relationship and accuses Carlos of a monstrous act, the investigation into the truth is left up to a curt, stonehearted British inspector, whose inquiries bring to light a horrendous secret. At turns epic and intimate, Prospero's Daughter, from American Book Award winner Elizabeth Nunez, uses Shakespeare’s play as a template to address questions of race, class, and power, in the story of an unlikely bond between a boy and a girl of disparate backgrounds on a verdant Caribbean island during the height of tensions between the native population and British colonists. “Gripping and richly imagined . . . a master at pacing and plotting . . . an entirely new story that is inspired by Shakespeare, but not beholden to him.” —The New York Times Book Review “Absorbing . . . [Nunez] writes novels that resound with thunder and fury.” —Essence “A story about the transformative power of love . . . Readers are sure to enjoy the journey.” —Black Issues Book Review (Novel of the Year)

Time, Literature, and Cartography After the Spatial Turn

Time, Literature, and Cartography After the Spatial Turn
Author: Adam Barrows
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 191
Release: 2016-06-01
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1137569018

Time, Literature and Cartography after the Spatial Turn argues that the spatial turn in literary studies has the unexplored potential to reinvigorate the ways in which we understand time in literature. Drawing on new readings of time in a range of literary narratives, including Vladimir Nabokov’s Ada and James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, Adam Barrows explores literature’s ability to cartographically represent the dense and tangled rhythmic processes that constitute lived spaces. Applying the insights of ecological resilience studies, as well as Henri Lefebvre’s late work on rhythm to literary representations of time, this book offers a sustained examination of literature’s “chronometric imaginary”: its capacity to map the temporal relationships between the human and the non-human, the local and the global.

Virginia Woolf's Rooms and the Spaces of Modernity

Virginia Woolf's Rooms and the Spaces of Modernity
Author: Suzana Zink
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 232
Release: 2018-02-01
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 3319719092

This book provides a fascinating account of rooms in selected works by Virginia Woolf. Casting them as spaces which are at once material, textual and emotional, the volume shows Woolf’s rooms to be consistently connected to wider geographies of modernity and therefore central to her writing of gender, class, empire and the nation. The discussion moves “in and out of rooms,” from the focus on travel in Woolf’s debut novel, to the archival function of built space and literary heritage in Night and Day, the university as a male space of learning in Jacob’s Room, the iconic A Room of One’s Own and its historical readers, interior space as spatial history in The Years, and rooms as loci of memory in her unfinished memoir. Zink masterfully shows the spatial formation of rooms to be at the heart of Woolf’s interweaving of the political and the aesthetic, revealing an understanding of space as dynamic and relational.