Literature, Geography and

The study of literature from a geographical perspective takes as its premise the recognition that questions of space, place, and spatiality are constitutive of, rather than merely supplementary to, the kinds of meaning, significance, and communication that literature produces. This idea exceeds the simple recognition that literary narratives (poems, novels, myths, etc.) unfold at particular locations. Rather, there are five broad fields of literary geographical concern:

• 1.
  Literature as a humanistic and meaningful narrative of place
• 2.
  Literature as an object of historical geographical analysis
• 3.
  Literature as a site of ideological critique
• 4.
  Literature as an exposition of postcolonial geographical imaginations
• 5.
  Literature as an expression of particular spatialities and their attendant “structures of feeling”

Within these fields, the relation between text and context is taken seriously, because it is ...