1st Edition
Geocritical Cosmopolitanism Space, Literature, and the Sense of the Global
Acknowledgements
Introduction: “A Proper Love for the World”
Part I. The Frame and the Map
1. Geocritical Worlding: Spatiality Studies on a Global Scale
2. Ever Given; or, the Crisis Called the World System
3. The Logic of the Situation: Place, Orientation, and Demystification
4. “Nothing human is alien to me”: Boundaries of Spatial Critical Practice
5. Zones of Experience: Marxism, Mapping, and Spatial Literary Studies
Part II. The Polis and the Cosmos
6. Walking in the Global City: Itineraries, Maps, and Lines of Flight
7. Of Other American Spaces: The Alterity of the Urban in the National Imaginary
8. A Postmodern Mappa Mundi: Configuring a Metropolitan Space
9. Unmappably Cosmopolitan: Cultural Criticism the Postnational Condition
Part III. Representing the Global
10. Is the World a Place?: Philology, Geocriticism, and Weltliteratur
11. The World is Bent: Cosmopolitanism After the Plastic Turn
12. “Unlimited, but exceedingly monotonous and forbidding”; or, Oceanic Spaces
13. Reading a “Chinese” Novel; or, the Cultural Logic of Globalization 2.0
Conclusion: Heterotopophrenia
Bibliography
Index
Biography
Robert T. Tally Jr. is Distinguished University Professor of English at Texas State University, USA. His books include The Critical Situation: Vexed Perspectives in Postmodern Literary Studies (2023), Topophrenia: Place, Narrative, and the Spatial Imagination (2018), The Routledge Handbook of Literature and Space (2018), and Spatiality (2013).
'Geocritical Cosmopolitanism is a major achievement in contemporary criticism—an intellectually ambitious, deeply humane book that combines theoretical rigor, historical depth, and political urgency. Drawing from an impressive range of literary, philosophical, and cultural traditions, Robert Tally forges new relationships between narrative, space, and global interconnectedness. At a time of rising nationalism amid deepening fragmentation, he brings geocriticism into productive dialogue with cosmopolitanism as both an interpretive practice and an ethical necessity. Essential reading across the humanities.'
- Nicoletta Pireddu. Director, Georgetown Humanities Initiative; Professor, Italian and Comparative Literature, Georgetown University
‘Robert Tally's latest book advances his work in Literary Spatial Studies, exploring the "cartographic imperative" and its relationship to cosmopolitanism. Building on Topophrenia, it introduces geocritical approaches to World literature, utopia/dystopia, and oceanic space narratives across a literary corpus stretching from antiquity to the present and beyond Western traditions. Working in the lineage of Auerbach and Jameson, Tally delivers a theoretically rich yet accessible contribution that opens new avenues for thinking about literature, theory, and worldly experience.’
- Christina Kkona, Marie Curieco-fund Fellow-Associate Professor, Aarhus Institute of Advanced Studies, Aarhus University, Denmark
