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 in this site that the historical, social, political, and philosophical significance of literature is most acute—precisely because the geographical and historical contexts of literary production and consumption affect and determine that significance.

As Andrew Thacker has noted, literary texts represent social spaces. For example, from the enclosed, gendered spatialities and formal social marriage circuits of Jane Austen's predominantly rural England to the modernist urban encounters and fragmentary perspectives of James Joyce's Dublin, literature inscribes a whole history of sociospatial relations and images of geographical reality. At the same time, social spaces shape literary forms. Thus, there are particular spatial histories to writing communities and their readerships, in which social, economic, and political contextual relations feed into the production of distinct literary forms. Geography shapes literary history, as literatures are both expressions of particular cultures, nationalities, and languages and at the same time sites of passage, translation, and communication between different cultures, identities, and beliefs.

Geography has also fed into the study of narrative (diegetics) within literary [Page 1786]criticism. Since the “spatial turn,” literary studies often employ spatial languages and metaphors to better explicate the ways in which narrative functions and has its own “textual space,” extending from the materiality and locational specificity of the book to the structured space of the page itself. Spatial metaphors have thus become ubiquitous within literary criticism. Border, boundary, margin, orientation, mapping, (de)territorialization, and so on have come to be constitutive of literary sense.