1st Edition
The Routledge Handbook of Literary Geographies
The Routledge Handbook to Literary Geographies provides a comprehensive overview of recent research and a range of innovative ways of thinking literature and geography together. It maps the history of literary geography and identifies key developments and debates in the field.
Written by leading and emerging scholars from around the world, the 38 chapters are organised into six themed sections, which consider: differing critical methodologies; keywords and concepts; literary geography in the light of literary history; a variety of places, spaces, and landforms; the significance of literary forms and genres; and the role of literary geographies beyond the academy. Presenting the work of scholars from different disciplinary backgrounds, each section offers readers new angles from which to view the convergence of literary creativity and geographical thought. Collectively, the contributors also address some of the major issues of our time including the climate emergency, movement and migration, and the politics of place.
Literary geography is a dynamic interdisciplinary field dedicated to exploring the complex relationships between geography and literature. This cutting-edge collection will be an essential resource for undergraduate and postgraduate students in both Geography and Literary Studies, and scholars interested in the evolving interface between the two disciplines.
List of Contributors
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Neal Alexander and David Cooper
Part I: Critical methodologies
1. Reading literature, reading geography
Marc Brosseau
2. Relational literary geographies
Sheila Hones
3. Literary geographies and the limits of representation
Hayden Lorimer
4. Literary assemblages
Jon Anderson
5. Postcolonial literary geographies
Madhu Krishnan and Penny Cartwright
6. Literature, environment, geography
Jos Smith
7. Mapping literature
Sara Luchetta
Part II: Keywords
8. Space
Peter Merriman
9. Place
Sten Pultz Moslund
10. Landscape
John Wylie
11. Region
Juha Ridanpää
12. Mobilities
Lynne Pearce
13. Diaspora
Françoise Král
Part III: Literary geography and literary history
14. Paths and parchment: Medieval literary geographies
Marianne O’Doherty
15. Geographies of early modern English literatures and the place of the stage
Julie Sanders
16. The eighteenth century: Sights, scales, travels
Robert Mayhew
17. Romantic literary geographies
Penny Bradshaw
18. The nineteenth century
David McLaughlin
19. Literary geographies of modernism
Neal Alexander
20. Contemporary literary geography
Alexander Beaumont
Part IV: Places, spaces, and landforms
21. The city
Monica Manolescu
22. Islands
Uma Kothari and Joseph Palis
23. Rivers
Sarah de Leeuw
24. The sea
John Brannigan
25. Mountains
Jonathan Westaway
26. Borderlands
Ana Maria Manzanas Calvo
27. Utopias
Jamie Harris
28. Outer Space
James Kneale
Part V: Forms and genres
29. The novel: Performing black geographies in African American fiction
Herman Beavers
30. Geo graphien
James Riding and Olivia Mason
31. Poetry
Heather H. Yeung
32. Drama and performance
Laurence Publicover
33. Comics
Giada Peterle
Part VI: Beyond the academy
34. Murderscapes, deathscapes, and workscapes in Québec’s Eastern Townships fiction and ‘immersive literary geographies’
Ceri Morgan
35. Experiential literary geography in the mind and in Minecraft
Sally Bushell
36. Literary river-walking and the politics of place-making
Emily Potter and Brigid Magner
37. Trees, texts, and place-based education: The pedagogic potential of literary geography
David Cooper and Christopher Hanley
Afterword
38. Geography and the creative writer
Tim Cresswell
Index
Biography
Neal Alexander is Senior Lecturer in Twentieth-Century Literature at Aberystwyth University (UK). His publications include Late Modernism and the Poetics of Place (2022), Poetry and Geography: Space and Place in Post-war Poetry (co-edited with David Cooper; 2013) and Regional Modernisms (co-edited with James Moran; 2013).
David Cooper is Senior Lecturer in English at Manchester Metropolitan University (UK) and the founding Co-Director of the Centre for Place Writing. He has published widely on literary geographies and co-edited Literary Mapping in the Digital Age (with Christopher Donaldson and Patricia Murrieta-Flores; 2016).
