Literary Geographies

Sometime in the second century CE, Pausanias of Magnesia (modern-day Turkey) wrote the Description of Greece. Ostensibly a tour of the places to see on the Greek mainland, the Description also provides historical accounts related to the topography through which Pausanias moves. Little attention has been given to how these building blocks of narrative, the entities of place and time, relate to and intersect with each other. In this article, we establish a framework for systematically investigating Pausanias's chronotopes through a process of semantic annotation. We describe our typology for categorizing place and time, with the aim of enabling this text's database of information -the descriptions of the built environment, its temples, statues, etc. -to be mapped and analysed. Our emphasis, however, is on how the technology equally facilitates close reading, as we trace how individual locations, objects and people relate to each other through the unfolding of chronotopes, and examine how in turn these chronotopes transform our understanding of

The intercity train between Helsinki and Jyväskylä is filled with stories. To be on time for seminars that require in-person attendance, I travel in the early hours; there are only a few fellow passengers and it is relatively quiet. As we leave the capital and travel north, the scenery outside the train windows changes. The city centre with the older districts disappears from sight, followed by industrial buildings and blocks of flats, followed by forests and lakes and small towns passing by, and-depending on the season-by wetlands and mist or by snowy fields and frozen rivers. Three and a half hours on the train is dedicated to reading fiction on my phone, looking out of the window and-occasionally-napping. In the evening, with the events concluded, another three and a half hours of travel awaits me. Trains and stations are among Augé's non-places (1995), presumably the same everywhere, lacking individuality, with few exceptional features to remember them by. Today, an intercity train in Finland is basically the same as an intercity train in South Korea, if Train to Busan (2016 South Korean film about a zombie virus outbreak) is anything to go by. I cannot say I missed the train trips during the pandemic, but the time and space the commute offered turned into a peculiar interplay of extra-literary experiences. In the first year of my regular commute during my PhD studies, I reread short stories by Oscar Wilde, which I found easy to 'situate' in Helsinki where I lived at the time. Next was Sheridan Le Fanu, whose stories also resonated with the Nordic capital's gloominess but could just as well be placed in a countryside manor. Solitary old houses glimpsed from the train window supplied a suitable enough setting for the latter.

Although often typified as an Australian short story writer, Louis Becke’s literary oeuvre includes over sixty articles and stories concerning the natural environments and ecologies of the South Pacific region, his knowledge of which was so respected by his peers that he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Geographic Society. In his The World In Which We Occur, Neil W Browne uses the term ‘ecological writing’ for that literary understanding of the participation between the human and natural worlds evident in this group of Becke’s work in which he observes and discusses not only animals (particularly fish and birds), as well as flora and fauna of various Pacific Islands and the Australian east coast littoral, but also human participation in those environments and ecologies that includes the Islanders’ sustainable management of their natural resources. At the turn of the nineteenth century, at a time when Europeans and Australians alike knew very little about the South Pacific, Becke articulated in his ecological writing the complex interactions between the region’s human culture and natural world within his own literary ecosystem of the imagination in which writer, reader, text, landforms, creatures, and humans were vitally entwined.

Before the foundation of sociology as an academic discipline in the late nineteenth century, both social scientific and literary scholars sought to provide tools for navigating increasingly complex societies and ever-more pressing social issues. More than providing a fixed set of definitions, literary texts excelled in theorizing the social in the sense of the Greek theōrein, meaning to consider or speculate. However, due to growing disciplinary specialization, sociology began mimicking methods of the sciences, becoming more plausible in delivering social knowledge. The relationship between sociology and literature has mainly become one of a knowing subject and a passive object-hence the preposition »of« in the sociology of literature. Contemporary sociology of literature has predominantly focused on literary production, subordinating literary works to social interactions and institutions-the work of Pierre Bourdieu and his follower Gisèle Sapiro being prime examples. Even sociologists who recognize the usefulness of literature for its intrinsic qualities often view literary texts as passive objects to be translated into sociological discourse. I propose a cultural sociology of literature to remedy this epistemological asymmetry. Following the Yale School of Cultural Sociology, the proposed model refuses to reduce literature to a mere epiphenomenon of its social dimensions. Instead, it recognizes literary works »as relatively autonomous cultural entities« possessing their own agency. The key is a symmetrical analytical focus on the inner structures of literary texts as well as their social surroundings. To secure this principle, I employ two concepts. First, I adopt the concept of iconic experience, which the Yale School developed to grasp the nondiscursive, aesthetic dimensions of social life. I employ the iconic experience to account for the meaning-making as it occurs within a spatio-temporally unique reading experience while also being navigated by persistent cultural patterns and norms. Second, I operationalize the concept of structures of feeling to tackle social phenomena broadly shared over time yet lacking more explicit discursive definitions. These nondiscursive collective representations – sometimes called Zeitgeist or generational feeling – can be captured intelligibly by literary forms and aesthetic devices, as these can easily signify ambiguity and openness of meaning. I argue a combination of sociological and literary theoretical discourse is needed to capture aspects of the social-literary interaction usually »lost in translation« between literary and sociological genres.

I develop this research model through a case study of the Irish author Sally Rooney’s novel Normal People. The goal is to trace how the »literary« and the »social« mutually constitute each other and partake in the overall process of meaning-making. What is the role of Normal People’s literary form in creating a well-marketed book product, connected with its supposed extraordinary intellectual merits as a »generational novel«? Thanks to its aesthetic devices, Rooney’s novel presents social relationships as a social fact that escapes discursive definition yet heavily impacts social action. On the one hand, the characters have the intellectual and reflexive capacity to perpetually evaluate and categorize their actions when navigating the turbulent waters of romance and intimacy. On the other hand, the prevalent emotional culture makes them yield their agency to social norms and the normalized ideal of social relationships as effortless and natural. Unlike scholarly accounts, reading Rooney’s novel can account for social relationships both as a unity – relatively stable structures of feeling upon which all social relationships feed – and as a polyvalent ambiguity – experiencing social relationships as self-contradictory, volatile, and tacit. That is possible due to the iconic experience of reading, which renders social theorizing through novels as a condensed and indivisible blend of sensual immediacy and abstract representations.

L'article fa una aproximació al patrimoni literari del Maestrat i a les rutes literàries de la comarca a partir de la contextualització de la geografia literària europea i dels Països Catalans, de manera que es fa un recorregut pels aspectes més significatius de la matèria i un recull de les referències existents, amb especial atenció a la Fundació Carles Salvador i les rutes de l'Estiu Literari al Maestrat. L'apartat de conclusions també inclou propostes de desenvolupament de la matèria a la comarca del Maestrat en diferents àmbits.

The article makes an approach to the literary patrimony of Maestrat and the literary tours of the region from the contextualization inthe European literary geography and the Catalan Countries. Accordingly, the most signficant aspects and the current references of the matter are reviewed emphasizing the Carles Salvador Foundation and the Literary Summer tours. Also, several projectsto develop this matter in different areas in the region of Maestrat are included in the conclusions.

What can we learn from an attempt to refuse conversation and its connected demonstration of the link between form and content in fiction? On the surface-a colloquialism which will take on a new dimension as this essay progresses-Hernan Diaz's 2017 novel In the Distance is a journey narrative and a Western. Both generic categories are geographically laden and directional in nature, as a journey needs a starting point and a destination, and as is implied in the very title of 'Western' which denotes certain formal expectations and geographical boundaries. What the novel also offers is a particularly geographic examination of the twinned concepts of conversation and silence, and paired communicatory elements such as echoes and aurality. These communicative facets culminate in the novel's formally intriguing 'burrowing' segment, within which the intersection of curious geography, conversation, and silence is most pronounced. Although the protagonist ultimately fails to remove himself from conversation, i.e. human society, his attempt to do so establishes an intriguing concept of space and place that is created by a character's attempted refusal of the human elements of both. In Diaz's debut novel, Håkan Söderström and his brother Linus immigrate to New York from Sweden in the nineteenth century, but they are separated upon arrival and never

When thinking about the scope for interdisciplinary collaboration, it is always interesting when one comes across the same term being used across various disciplines, as it suggests a shared vocabulary ripe for exploration. Embodiment is one such term. Originally a Western philosophical concept regarding the Fall, embodiment has come to focus more on the nature of subjectivity, or, as Justin E.H. Smith puts it, ‘the extent to which one’s own subjective experience of the world is forged or inflected by the particular sort of body one has’ (2017: 1). If we take this quotation as the starting point of discussion, we can pinpoint three particular ideas of note. Firstly, that embodiment relates to our subjective experience, a key-component of much literature. Secondly, that the focus of that experience is in and of the world, a distinctly geographical concept. And thirdly, that bodies can come in different ‘sorts’, familiar ground to anyone with an interest in any kind of ‘othering’ be t...

The essay sketches a typology of layered representations of urban history based on the question of how texts activate different strata beneath the cityscape. In describing these layers, we are guided by Walter Benjamin's concept of superposition or 'Überdeckungstransparenz' (as formulated in the Arcades Project), a specific mode of perception which allows for the simultaneous awareness of different temporal layers. What is central to our endeavour is the structural analogy of 'city' and 'text' -both in the sense of reading 'the urban landscape as a form analogous to that of a literary composition' (Sharpe and Wallock 1987: 11) and, conversely, of studying 'how a text can function like the city in its layering of meanings' (Gurr 2015: 24). We further take our cue from Martindale's distinction between 'diachronic and historical' approaches, allowing for a clear distinction between 'past' and 'present' on the one hand, and 'archaeological and synchronic' approaches layering different periods of time so as to suggest a timeless, simultaneous 'presence of the past' (sensu Eliot) on the other hand . We propose a matrix, as it were, of temporal and spatial 'directions' of layering, distinguishing between retrospective, simultaneous and prospective temporal superpositions and 'cospatial' (layerings of different temporal strata of the same city) as opposed to translocal (overlay of different cities and spaces) spatial superpositions of different cities. We thus seek to provide a more nuanced outline of the textual strategies used to access, make visible (or at times construct) buried layers of spatialised, palimpsestuous urban memory.

This book examines science fiction, fantasy and horror novels utilizing a conceptual toolkit of the ten duties of speculative fiction. Building on previous work in the discipline of geography it will demonstrate the value of speculation in the visualisation of Anthropocene futures.

The book presents insights into how novels produce specifically geographical knowledge about the world - spatialities - and how they use both literal maps and figurative counter-mappings to comment upon and shape futures. This book is about much more than science fiction. It covers areas of literature and para-literature associated with the "fantastic" and as such, looks also at works of fantasy and horror. The areas of overlap between these three categories of fantastic literature are posited as the most productive in the terms by which this book navigates, namely, spatiality. The book will explore, through the critical examination of a selection of key works of speculative fiction, how science-fictional and fantastic narratives are spatialized through both conceptual and literal mappings.

This book is intended for both an academic and practitioner and for people interested in both producing scholarly commentary upon works of speculative fiction; and for those writing speculative fiction and novels.

Much attention has been given to the representation of place in Australian literature (e.g. Gerster; Darian-Smith, Gunner and Nuttall; Haynes; Cranston and Zeller), but comparably little to this literature’s participation in the production, or making, of place. This special issue brings together scholars working in a field that can be identified by various critical and historical movements in literary and cultural studies which constellate around questions of literature’s intersections with the materiality of place. This field includes literary and cultural geography, psychogeography, critical regionalism, new materialisms, spatial history, and place-making studies. While diverse and dynamic, a commonality across these theoretical and methodological approaches is the understanding of place as an unbounded, non-geographically determined, and relationally constituted, real-world context for practices of living and meaning-making; and the recognition of complex, more than material, and...

The term 'place made after the story' (Barton and Barton 2004; Carter 2015) acknowledges the power that stories have on emergent communities and their more-than-human worlds. It is a concept inspired by Indigenous place-making practices in Australia (and the land now called Australia), which are performative and ephemeral as well as material, understood as constellations of space and time brought into being by song, ritual, and other collective storytelling practices (Watson 2009). As this position paper will advance, place-making through narrative practice is not isolated to Indigenous Australian culture, but is, rather, a relation that is immanent to all acts of storytelling. In line with this, the colonisation of Australia, and subsequent engagements with this history, can be understood as narrative, as much as material, processes. As we go onto suggest, the question of literary geography in Australia prompts a reconsideration of literary history that takes into account an expanded, geographically inflected, field of story-telling. These questions have come to light in the context of our ongoing project of literary history, in the Mallee region of southeastern Australia. What happens if we consider the place

This paper proposes an atmospheric understanding of regional writing, and considers a critical methodology for assembling a literary history of the Kurangk/Coorong region of South Australia. In opposition to literary history guided by national forms, this methodology works from within the shifting entanglements of postcolonial place and its many stories, recognising the material impacts of poetic practice on more-than-human environments. The future of the Kurangk/Coorong is caught up in how this place has, and continues to be, imagined and narrated.

In 1907, siding with nature writer John Burroughs, President Theodore Roosevelt accused a number of writers of animal stories of being "naturefakers," because they ascribed to animals what he and Burroughs considered human characteristics, such as reason and choice. (This controversy had in fact started several years earlier and originally included other authors.) In the 1907 outburst, however, Jack London was among the writers thus accused. he relates the controversy in the essay "The Other Animals," published in March, 1908, where he strongly refutes Burroughs' claim that animals are automatons that react only mechanically and by instinct, a view of animals that London calls old-fashioned and "homocentric". 1 London supports his argument, and defends his criticized dog stories, in two ways. First he acknowledges that other writers had indeed been guilty of humanizing animals, something he strongly disapproves of. London claims that his writing has been designed to create a different impression: Time and again, and many times, in my narratives, I wrote, speaking of my dog-heroes: 'he did not think these things; he merely did them,' etc. And I did this repeatedly, /…/ in order to hammer into the average human understanding that these dog-heroes of mine were not directed by abstract reasoning, but by instinct, sensation, and emotion, and by simple reasoning. Also, I endeavored to make my stories in line with the facts of evolution; I hewed them to the mark set by scientific research. 2

Drawing from cutting-edge climate science, popular representations of climate change convey a grim future in which life appears difficult if not impossible. While it is important to communicate the direness of future climate change, these representations depict the future as a forgone conclusion, which profoundly impacts the way climate change is perceived in the present. Rather than envisioning the future planet as a dead end, this article uses the worldbuilding inherent in science fiction to think more expansively and creatively about the possibilities of climate futures otherwise. Also drawing from cutting-edge research, science fiction builds worlds around facts, allowing readers to cognitively inhabit the future, to emotionally connect with characters that live there, and to consider the political and social implications of a climate changed planet. This paper first outlines the ways in which science fiction has already engaged with climate science. Then, this paper turns to th...

The essay sketches a typology of layered representations of urban history based on the question of how texts activate different strata beneath the cityscape. In describing these layers, we are guided by Walter Benjamin's concept of superposition or 'Überdeckungstransparenz' (as formulated in the Arcades Project), a specific mode of perception which allows for the simultaneous awareness of different temporal layers. What is central to our endeavour is the structural analogy of 'city' and 'text'-both in the sense of reading 'the urban landscape as a form analogous to that of a literary composition' (Sharpe and Wallock 1987: 11) and, conversely, of studying 'how a text can function like the city in its layering of meanings' (Gurr 2015: 24). We further take our cue from Martindale's distinction between 'diachronic and historical' approaches, allowing for a clear distinction between 'past' and 'present' on the one hand, and 'archaeological and synchronic' approaches layering different periods of time so as to suggest a timeless, simultaneous 'presence of the past' (sensu Eliot) on the other hand (Martindale 1996). We propose a matrix, as it were, of temporal and spatial 'directions' of layering, distinguishing between retrospective, simultaneous and prospective temporal superpositions and 'cospatial' (layerings of different temporal strata of the same city) as opposed to translocal (overlay of different cities and spaces) spatial superpositions of different cities. We thus seek to provide a more nuanced outline of the textual strategies used to access, make visible (or at times construct) buried layers of spatialised, palimpsestuous urban memory.

My article investigates the manifold interactions between textual and diagrammatic elements. First, it outlines the changes in literary and cultural studies in the wake of the so-called ‘topographical turn,’ which have made possible the identification of certain cartographic practices as cultural techniques. Second, it discusses Friedrich Kittler’s idea of literature as a cultural technique itself, and considers how this concept can be reconciled with the topographical turn. Third, it analyses a handful of cartographic techniques employed in narratives and argues for a field of scriptural operations that provide a common ground for jointly reading maps and novels. Fourth, it carries out a reading of Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow which focuses on how the diagrammatic inscription of the V2 rocket and its arc condition both the protagonists’ movement on the novel’s plane and the map-making instances in the narrative. Fifth and finally, it points out why Pynchon’s work might be con...

Résumé : Notre contribution vise à explorer l’univers narratif de Jean Giono selon une approche cartographique, à la croisée de la géocritique, des disciplines du paysage et des sciences patrimoniales. Notre objectif est d’interroger les rapports de l’écrivain aux cartes et leur rôle, d’une part, dans la création des espaces fictionnels, de l’autre, dans la mise en place de parcours patrimoniaux de découverte de la Haute-Provence. Une première partie se concentre sur l’interrelation narrative qui s’établit entre la pratique cartographique, la mémoire et l’expérience spatiale (le lien entre la carte et la genèse de l’écriture). La deuxième partie se focalise sur les utilisations patrimoniales de cette écriture cartographique, avec la
présentation de quelques cas d’étude (cartographies imaginaires et promenades littéraires). Une place importante est accordée aux rapports entre carte et marche, dispositifs de découverte et tout à la fois de compréhension de l’espace provençal et de ces géographies littéraires.

Mots-clés : Giono (auteur), Provence, cartographie littéraire, promenades littéraires, patrimoine

Riassunto: Il presente contributo intende esplorare l’universo narrativo di Jean Giono, secondo un approccio cartografico a cavallo tra geocritica, discipline del paesaggio e scienze patrimoniali. Intendiamo interrogare il rapporto dello scrittore con le carte e il ruolo che esse assumono: nella creazione degli spazi di finzione, da un lato, nella messa a punto di percorsi patrimoniali volti alla (ri)scoperta della Haute-Provence, dall’altro. Una prima parte si concentra sull’interrelazione narrativa che lega pratica cartografica, memoria e esperienza spaziale (carta e genesi della scrittura). La seconda sezione si focalizza piuttosto sugli usi patrimoniali di questa scrittura cartografica, con la presentazione di qualche caso di studio (cartografie immaginarie e passeggiate letterarie). Uno spazio importante è attribuito ai rapporti tra carta e camminata, dispositivi di scoperta e comprensione, al tempo stesso, dello spazio provenzale e di queste geografie letterarie.

Parole chiave: Giono (autore), Provenza, cartografia letteraria, passeggiate letterarie, patrimonio

Some object-oriented philosophers conceive of time and space as if they were emerging from objects. In this paper, we suggest that the graphic novel 'Here' (2014) by Richard McGuire gives visual form to these conceptions. The graphic novel tells the story of a place -namely, one corner of a living room- moving backwards and forwards in time using the superimposition of various panels on each page. Through these 'time windows' the narration exceeds the limits of human life and embraces manifold spatio-temporal virtualities within a single page. If objects themselves are maps involved in the processes of spacing and timing, creating connections like resonating echoes, 'Here' functions as an onto-cartography that proposes objects as archaeological sites. Telling coexisting stories of ancient pasts and possible futures, McGuire's graphic novel creatively attunes us to the worlds of objects, providing an aesthetic mapping of the lives of objects.

inescapable condition. Searching for the conceptual roots which underpin this inescapability, the book excavates the works of Max Weber and Jean Jacques Rousseau. Amidst feelings of disenchantment and a nihilistic rationalization brought about by modernity, Weber is said to herald the nation as a source of meaningful life; whereas Rousseau, despite the fact that he was writing before the nationalist idea was propagated by the French Revolution, is presented as having been instrumental in justifying political and cultural unity as a response to the loss of a sense of community in the passage from the natural to the modern world. These narratives are used by the Author to explain why nationalism remains so persistent in today's world. As a way to move away from a nationalist logic of unity, homogeneity, and linearity, both in space and in time, the book engages with sites of memory in post-Holocaust Berlin and with everyday urban encounters. Both are used to illustrate a politics of coexistence organized not around identity, agreement, commonality and shared meanings, but formed through crossings, exchanges, and disagreements, as best captured in Nancy's (2003) concept of the mêlée. The book certainly offers an elegant account of the limits of national politics, yet the 'solution' it proposes seems neither very convincing nor to fully encompass Nancy's reasoning. The critique of nationalism itself also seems in need of further specification. Let me first start with this latter point. The association of the nation(al) with a unified space, subject and time reads too simplistically. A reading certainly true when we look at the nationalistic rhetoric of 19 th-20 th centuries, but a reading which fails to capture how today the nation is increasingly

Connecting to the recent geographical debate on «literary GIS» and the wide potentialities of the cartographic analysis applied to literature, this paper presents the first results of a hefty work of cataloging and mapping of over 700 place names in the fiction of Mario Rigoni Stern (Il sergente nella neve, Quota Albania, Storia di Tönle, L'anno della vittoria, Le stagioni di Giacomo, L'ultima partita a carte). The analytical potential of a synoptic view through several maps is here highlighted, with reference to three main themes among the many possible: the pattern of distribution of the place names from the local context to the global scale, the historical depth which always characterizes the reference to space and places, and the crucial role carried out by the memory of places and the «elsewhere's geographies» in the author's literary works.

In this essay, the author argues that analysing a fantasy novel that comes with a map without taking into account the dynamic between map and text would be to omit a vital part of the fictional world. By drawing on the Vitruvian triad of architectural theory, the construction of the world in China Mieville’s  Perdido Street Station  (2001) is analysed through some building-blocks of that world that emerge prominently on the novel’s map. After a brief discussion of world-building and fantasy maps, the map is taken as a starting point in order to demonstrate how the transport network in general and railways and skyrail in particular are given distinctive form. One function that these building-blocks have in the novel is to provide locations which the reader can use to link dynamically between text and map, thus relating locations to each other spatially and adding layers of meaning to them, turning them from spaces into places. Passages in the text are used to show how it is possible ...

This paper examines how landscapes in literary texts create emotional responses in readers. These responses become a reservoir which readers use to navigate difficult times. The focus of the paper is on the COVID 19 pandemic and how it resonates with apocalyptic literature.

In the early autumn of 2019 Sean Cotter who, before 2000, translated some of Nichita Danilov's poems and two essays by Mircea Eliade, followed, in the new century, by some of Nichita Stănescu's poems and Mircea Cărtărescu's novel Orbitor, came to Iaşi for the Festival of Literature and Translation (FILIT). Sean Cotter's latest feat of translation is Rakes of the Old Court, which the translator deems to be one of the "reperformances" of Mateiu Caragiale's Craii de Curtea Veche. In 1995, this particular novel was chosen by a poll of more than one hundred literary critics as the best Romanian novel of all times. On the 4th of October 2019 Sean Cotter gave a talk about his translation of the novel in a FILIT-related event organised by the Faculty of Letters of "Alexandru Ioan Cuza" University of Iaşi, and answered some questions about translation in an interview published in Revista de Traduceri Literare. This study looks into the cultural, aesthetic and linguistic challenges posed by a text which is an intersection of Balkan and Western, Latinate and Turkish, Roman and Greek, seasoned with French and German elements. This cultural and linguistic mix of coarseness and elegance, a dense forest of symbols, heraldic emblems and myths, shaped by Mateiu Caragiale in a refined novel of Romanian decadence, baffles the mind. The question is: how does it translate? I am inclined to give credit to Walter Benjamin's approach to translation contending that "the kinship of languages manifests itself in translations" and "this is not accomplished through the vague resemblance a copy bears to the original." I argue, therefore, following the line of Benjamin's argument, that Sean Cotter's Rakes is contained in Mateiu Caragiale's Craii, as an "abyme" is in a "mise en abyme."

In February 1907, after months of unsuccessful wrangling with a conservative Congress unwilling to pass his reform legislation, President Theodore Roosevelt decided to grant an interview to Edward B. Clark of the Chicago Evening Post. The topic of the interview, however, was neither the president's proposed legislation nor the developing economic crisis that would soon become a financial panic. Instead, the two men discussed the seemingly frivolous issue of the accuracy of popular nature writing. Roosevelt asserted that naturalists William J. Long and Charles G. D. Roberts, as well as fiction writer Jack London, were "indulg[ing] in the wildest exaggeration[s]" and ignoring the actual "heart of the wild things." 1 Clark's interview was published in Everybody's magazine in June under the reporter's title, "Roosevelt on the Nature Fakirs." Almost immediately, "nature faker" became a national buzzword (the "-er" spelling was gradually adopted over the next several months), and the article sparked debate in newspapers and magazines across the country as to what constituted faithful nature reporting. Of the writers impugned by Roosevelt in Clark's original interview, Long, it seems, was most injured by the attack. He publicly repudiated the president, insisting that "the only fakir in this whole controversy. .. is the big fakir at Washington," and he vowed to prove Roosevelt wrong, even if he had to "spend ten years in digging up the evidence and submitting it to a tribunal." 2 Perhaps because, as a novelist, his reputation depended far less than Long's on accurate nature reporting, London did not protest the attack nearly as vociferously as did Long, and it was over a year before London's full reply to Roosevelt appeared in print. Ever the pugilist, however, London did not

The problem of justice seems to be the common theme in Hanu Ancuţei [Ancuţa's Inn]-Mihail Sadoveanu"s book of tales. The world portrayed by Sadoveanu functions according to archaic norms. Justice is made either by the ruler (or by his men), or on one"s own (provided there is enough strength), in accordance with some ancient laws. The helpless (when the ruler is not on their side) hope for divine justice. A coherent system of laws and fair judges, devoted to unbiased justice (similar to the German one, mentioned in one of the tales), remain a desideratum in this literary masterpiece.

This themed section of Literary Geographies emerged from a Social and Cultural Geography group sponsored session at the 2014 Royal Geographical Society (including the Institute of British Geographers) Annual Conference. The session invited papers that investigated the ways in which geographies of fiction co-produce the real and imagined places around us. It invited scholars to explore the complex relations which produce the 'geography of fiction' (Piatti & Hurni 2011:218), specifically the ways through which page and place are co-produced in reading and writing practice. In using the term 'geography of fiction', Barbara Piatti and Lorenz Hurni write in the tradition of Franco Moretti (1998); they are interested in how we cartographically produce the imagined world of fictional texts. Here we use 'geography of fiction' to initiate a different journey into the fields of literary geography and literary studies. Our journey is less concerned with cartographically rendering the fictional world and more interested in examining how the real and imagined come together and brought to you by CORE View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk

This study uses the Geocritical method, as systematized by Bertrand Westphal in 2007, and applies it to the Greek novel The Mermaid Madonna [Παναγιά η Γοργόνα] by StratisMyrivilis for the first time. This novel uses as setting the settlement of Skala Skamnias or Mourias, which is located on Lesvos (an island of Greece in the NorthEastern Aegean Sea) after the Asia Minor Disaster in 1922 and after the arrival of the Greek refugees from Asia Minor to the island. The purpose of the study is to show how Geography is related to Literature and how the author deliberately chose Skala as the setting for his literary work in order to support his new perception of the concept of Greekness, as in his opinion it was formed after 1922.Thus, this article, first presents the Geocritical method and its use in the chosen novel and then applies it to the novel discussing how the author uses the place and time.

Insights captures the ideas and work-in-progress of the Fellows of the Institute of Advanced Study at Durham University. Up to twenty distinguished and 'fast-track' Fellows reside at the IAS in any academic year. They are world-class scholars who come to Durham to participate in a variety of events around a core inter-disciplinary theme, which changes from year to year. Each theme inspires a new series of Insights, and these are listed in the inside back cover of each issue. These short papers take the form of thought experiments, summaries of research findings, theoretical statements, original reviews, and occasionally more fully worked treatises. Every fellow who visits the IAS is asked to write for this series. The Directors of the IAS-Veronica Strang, Rob Barton, Barbara Graziosi and Martin Ward-also invite submissions from others involved in the themes, events and activities of the IAS.

In 1907, siding with nature writer John Burroughs, President Theodore Roosevelt accused a number of writers of animal stories of being "naturefakers," because they ascribed to animals what he and Burroughs considered human characteristics, such as reason and choice. (This controversy had in fact started several years earlier and originally included other authors.) In the 1907 outburst, however, Jack London was among the writers thus accused. he relates the controversy in the essay "The Other Animals," published in March, 1908, where he strongly refutes Burroughs' claim that animals are automatons that react only mechanically and by instinct, a view of animals that London calls old-fashioned and "homocentric". 1 London supports his argument, and defends his criticized dog stories, in two ways. First he acknowledges that other writers had indeed been guilty of humanizing animals, something he strongly disapproves of. London claims that his writing has been designed to create a different impression: Time and again, and many times, in my narratives, I wrote, speaking of my dog-heroes: 'he did not think these things; he merely did them,' etc. And I did this repeatedly, /…/ in order to hammer into the average human understanding that these dog-heroes of mine were not directed by abstract reasoning, but by instinct, sensation, and emotion, and by simple reasoning. Also, I endeavored to make my stories in line with the facts of evolution; I hewed them to the mark set by scientific research. 2

Mapping the Imagination: Literary Geography originates from a conference I organized at the University of Salerno (Italy) in March 2014. I am very grateful to all the participants. Thanks to their work, the conference was a success, and a stimulus for me to carry this project to the next level. 1 The seven articles in this special issue of Literary Geographies deal with British, U.S. and Canadian Literature from the nineteenth to the twenty-first century. The issue begins with the work of Italian Canadian poet and novelist Mary di Michele in 'Langscape: Language, Landscape and Memory, the Origins of a Poetics'. This article explores the nuances of her double belonging, and her connection to her place of birth in Abruzzo and to the Italian language. The articles move on to examine the treatment of space through a variety of texts and approaches, but all consider space and landscape to function as metonyms. In the articles, space serves important, even though often under-explored narrative roles: it can constitute the center of attention, a carrier of symbolic meaning, an object of emotional investment, a means of calculated planning, and a source of organization. The essays here show how 'narratology and geography can gain from cross-fertilization,' and the product could be an encompassing theory of space in which 'space and narrative intersect not at a single point, but rather converge around … interrelated issues' (Ryan, Foote and Azaryahu 2016: 3). The articles are part of a renewed conceptualization and analysis of the notions of space in works of literature and poetry, and build upon theories of space and place that made up what was known as the 'Spatial Turn' in the 1980s and 1990s. In a general sense, 'space' is the dimensional, physical extent occupied by human beings (OED). In contrast, 'place' is space that we know and 'endow with value' (Tuan 1977: 6). The process of turning 'space' into 'place,' this form of personal and psychological

This essay presents a synthesis of different conceptual approaches to the issue of cross-cultural experiences and contact-zones among cultures and languages, with a special emphasis on the importance of spaces of “crossing.” Through these critical lenses, national identity becomes a fluid concept, and borders are redefined as necessary but at the same time also shifting. The idea of “navigation” is here a key to working within a framework that simultaneously posits norms of identity and opens national identity up to discontinuity and displacement. The uneasy articulation of multiple figurations of displaced identities is key to the question of crossing linguistic and cultural borders.

between the high Modernism of Pound and Eliot, and the relative obscurity of later regional writers. Alexander explores the contradiction between the specifically-located autobiography, and the regional but impersonal history of Briggflatts (1965). Drew Milne appraises Hugh MacDiarmid's efforts to forge a language for a specifically Scottish literature. MacDiarmid proposed that his 'synthetic Scots' would do for Scotland what the hybrid language of Ulysses had done for Ireland. Milne brings up questions about homeland, borderland, and alienation. He identifies the source of modernism's 'transcendental homelessness' as global capitalism which brings alienation, rather than unification, via its trans-nationalist spread (143). The issues that the writers studied in this volume address have a distinctly contemporary flavour which is partly what makes this collection so timely: the devolution and dissolution of the United Kingdom, and debates about Scottish, Welsh and Northern Irish independence; discussions about what constitutes national and regional identities (and whether the two might ever cross over), as well as what it means to live as a subject under global capitalism; and the apparently imminent threats from the outside world of war and disease are all issues that come up in the collection. Furthermore, the book has a notably fresh perspective on its subject matter due to its engagement with recent work in the field: there are some instances where longer-established theoretical or critical voices are oddly absent, but the effect is to create an energised, contemporary presentation. While the collection's aim to redraw the boundaries of the map of modernism, looking beyond its metropolitan centres and familiar locales, is admirable, it is interesting that this quest for difference frequently generates the sorts of white, male, middle-class perspectives that are already represented by modernism. The subject of Irish post-colonialism is touched upon, but other former colonial regions are not represented. The collection brings together studies of a number of women writers: perhaps more than tend to appear in collections on modernism. However, the fact that a healthy number of women writers appear under the term 'regional', with its possible implications of a marginal, small or domestic perspective that lies outside the spheres of power and the centres of cultural production, complicates their relative success in this field. Crucially, though, the editors' introduction addresses a number of these issues and their subsequent collection of essays helps to complicate and define 'the regional' with regards to its positive, as well as its negative, connotations. This volume is, therefore, a revelatory and timely critical reader for anyone interested in literary geographies, or British and Irish writing in the twentieth century, and is an important contribution to modernist studies.

With this simple, yet devastating, exchange between two young people, the BBC brought to a close one of the standout productions of lockdown, Normal People, based very closely on the book of the same name by Sally Rooney. The timing somehow could not have been more perfect, as none of those watching could 'go' anywhere, but we were afforded the vicarious satisfactions of following Marianne and Connell on their various wanderings. Rooney takes us from the smalltown west of Ireland, on to Dublin, then on a tour of European highlights, the Italian interior, and a frigid Sweden, before laying a transatlantic path towards New York and beyond. Simultaneously, this bildungsroman is a journey into the shared, intimate space between two lovers, a space so personal that no matter how many others may try to enter, it will admit only these two (and the 21.8 million 1 iPlayer viewers trapped in their own space with them). It is a journey through domestic abuse, mental illness, self-harm, bereavement, and abasement but ultimately onwards towards a transient moment of contentment, fragile but all the more precious for its fleetingness. Normal People is also an exploration of Ireland and the occasional strangenesses of Irish life. Set in the aftermath of the economic downturn of the 2010s, Rooney captures a moment of ghost estates and lost opportunities, broken dreams caught up amidst 'bare concrete facades and overgrown front lawns' (Rooney 2018: 33). She brings an insider's eye to her work, coming as she does from Castlebar, a small town in Mayo and the likely model for her fictionalised Carricklea. She captures the tensions between the country and the city, or 'That Dublin' as my own mother in law refers to it, highlighting the toll moving there takes on Connell whilst Marianne appears to be a creature re-born on Trinity's College Green. The

Rendered with remarkable specificity and attention to place, Dubliners by James Joyce is a classic urban text. For Joyce, Dublin is synecdoche for a paralyzed Irish nation, immobilized socially, culturally, and economically by its colonial status. In portraying the geography of Dublin through fiction, Joyce conveys the city on two levels: first, through the social relations between characters, whose journeys through their city are always circular, and whose mobilities are circumscribed by their social position, and second, between reader and the text, whereby the city is coded via symbolic references to place that rely upon a knowledge of the city’s urban geography and cultural history. Nevertheless, despite his reliance on literary realism, Joyce’s depiction of Dublin is ultimately his own, personal reading of the ‘real’ city, written from afar. In this way, his collection pressures the boundaries of the real and the fictional. Through a close reading of three stories from the coll...

Much attention has been given to the representation of place in Australian literature (e.g. Gerster; Darian-Smith, Gunner and Nuttall; Haynes; Cranston and Zeller), but comparably little to this literature’s participation in the production, or making, of place. This special issue brings together scholars working in a field that can be identified by various critical and historical movements in literary and cultural studies which constellate around questions of literature’s intersections with the materiality of place. This field includes literary and cultural geography, psychogeography, critical regionalism, new materialisms, spatial history, and place-making studies. While diverse and dynamic, a commonality across these theoretical and methodological approaches is the understanding of place as an unbounded, non-geographically determined, and relationally constituted, real-world context for practices of living and meaning-making; and the recognition of complex, more than material, and...

On Monday 23 rd March 2020, Prime Minister Boris Johnson declared that Britain would now be on official lockdown but that most British residents could leave the house for one form of exercise per day. It was later suggested, by the Cabinet Office minister Michael Gove, that the exercise should either be a walk of up to an hour or a run or cycle ride of thirty minutes. At the start of lockdown, I was in the process of writing up my PhD thesis on the Shropshire authors Mary Cholmondeley and Mary Webb, how their work depicts women walking, and what this says about their desire for more freedoms in society. My research engages with concepts of space and place and I am particularly interested in how ideologies of gender play a role in the experience of space. As the government suggestion of 'one walk a day' became part of the daily routine of many British residents, I wish to analyse whether this walk restricted rather than encouraged people's sense of freedom and also how our concept of the space of home was affected by the enforced enclosure. Rebecca Solnit, in her study of walking entitled Wanderlust, explains how walking can help people experience the world in a more profound way: When you give yourself to places, they give you yourself back, the more one comes to know them, the more one seeds them with the invisible crop of memories and associations that will be waiting for you when you come back, while new places offer up new thoughts, new possibilities. Exploring the world is one of the best ways of exploring the mind, and walking travels both terrains. (Solnit 2014: 13)

This paper considers the question of what it might mean to resist the ‘imaginative geographies’ of the War on Terror through a reading of the bestselling novel The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid. Reading this novel against the claim that we are now at the ‘end’ of the War on Terror, the paper engages with how we might move beyond what Derek Gregory described as the split geographies of ‘us’ and ‘them’, ‘civilization’ and ‘barbarism’ that represent the violent return of the colonial past. The paper argues that critical attempts at resisting the imaginative geographies of the War on Terror, such as we find in this particular novel, often assume and reproduce an understanding of time as linear and progressive, an idea of time which Gregory points out makes these imaginative geographies possible. The paper argues that this becomes problematic when critical interventions risk reproducing the very understanding of political life that they set out to confront. Whilst it is an imp...

Literary geography is now a remarkably mobile interdiscipline. W hile celebrating the advances in understanding enabled by such intellectual and methodological agility, this Thinking Space paper argues that we ought, at the same time, to keep in mind Edward Said’s observations on the matter of ‘traveling theory’, and to employ a critical reflexivity when applying abstract theories across heterogeneous spaces and contexts. It argues that the national scale deserves further attention as a material and imaginative locus of human, spatial and literary interactivity.

Over recent years literary geography has adopted a relational approach to its subject matter. This article continues this move, suggesting that assemblage theory can help develop the sub-discipline in two interrelated ways. Firstly, at a project level, assemblage theory enables literary geographers to identify all components that have agency and influence over the power of fiction (including authors, translators, publishers, readers, places, etc). As part of this first argument, the article develops Hones’ concept of reading fiction as a ‘spatial event’ (Hones, 2008, 2014). This article interacts with Hones’ textual ‘happening’ and seeks to emphasise the valence of the spatial event of fiction on reader relations to material and social geographies. It offers a short case study from the work of novelist Tessa Hadley to illustrate aspects of this valence. Secondly, at the sub disciplinary level, the article argues that assemblage theory may offer a common ground which allows scholars ...

The title might be deceiving. This is not a book on the persistence of nationalism, but on the ways to overcome this persistence. The aim is to think how living together in/with/through diversity might be imagined and lived beyond a sense of national community. The Author's main concern is for a future which can be different from the present and to this purpose the book calls for a new political imagination which can coalesce around urban everyday encounters.

Greece is one of the principal countries inspiring the ‘Mediterranean Passion’ in 19 th - and 20 th -century English writers and artists. As part of the classical world, it was, together with Italy, a polisemic signifier, the container of a series of meanings and values that contributed to form the collective imaginary of the time. After being associated, in the Romantic period, to freedom and independence, art and beauty, and the perfection of human form and mind, Greece became, in the second half of the 19 th century, one of the terms in a series of polarities, among which Arnold’s Hebraism / Hellenism. Against this cultural background, George Gissing conceived his short novel Sleeping Fires (1895), whose plot unfolds between England and Greece, and whose story can be read as an argument against asceticism and an appeal for clarity. It is my aim to demonstrate how this novel consistently draws upon the writer’s Greek experiences as reported in his diary. Both texts show Gissing’s ...

This article proposes a multifocal approach to the travel narrative "Barcelona. Fragmentos de uma viagem inedita na Peninsula" by Carlos Jose Caldeira, ferventsuppotter of the Iberian Union, and author of the so-called Generation of 52, responsible for the 3rd edition in our country of the controversial work of SinibaldoMas, A Iberia. The thematic cartography presented proposes a representation of the lived space that intersects with the fictional space, the space of literary remembrance, of previous readings or founding texts of the genre, to enhance the thirdspace, where lived space and fictional space intertwine (Soja, 1986).

In response to popular demand for tropical island travelogues, The Century Company, a prominent New York City publisher, sent its star travel writer, Harry Franck, to the West Indies in 1919 to write a book and at least eight magazine articles. Roaming Through the West Indies was released in the fall of 1920, after selected chapters had been abridged and serialized in The Century Magazine. The book transformed Franck's reputation from that of a raconteur of entertaining travel tales to that of a contemporary critic of the United States' occupation of Haiti, guerilla warfare of so-called cacos, and the counterinsurgency campaign led by the US Marine Corps that effected the dramatic killing of cacos leader Charlemagne Péralte. I explore connections between Franck's charged criticisms of the occupation and civil administration of Haiti and the fiery rhetoric of National Association for the Advancements of Colored People (NAACP) officers James Weldon Johnson and Herbert Seli...