BOOK NEWS: Spatial literary studies, foundations to new approaches

Space and Literary Studies

Edited by Elizabeth F. Evans

Cambridge UP, 2025

ISBN: 9781009424240

https://www.cambridge.org/us/universitypress/subjects/literature/literary-theory/space-and-literary-studies?format=HB

Our experience of the world is deeply shaped by concepts of space. From territorial borders, to distinctions between public and private space, to the way we dwell in a building or move between rooms, space is central to how we inhabit our environment and make sense of our place within it. Literature explores and gives expression to the ways in which space impacts human experience. It also powerfully shapes the construction and experience of space. Literary studies has increasingly turned to space and, fuelled by feminist and postcolonial insights, the interconnections between material spaces and power relations. This book treats foundational theories in spatial literary studies alongside exciting new areas of research, providing a dual emphasis on origins and innovative approaches while maintaining constant attention to how the production and experience of space is intertwined with the production and circulation of power.

BOOK NEWS is an online-only feature announcing new publications in modernist and contemporary literary studies. These announcements do NOT constitute an endorsement by the Journal of Modern Literature.

• Discusses foundational concepts in light of contemporary and emergent research in spatial literary studies
• Examines the intersection of space and literary studies through twenty-one concepts and approaches
• Makes theoretical approaches concrete with reference to a transnational and transhistorical selection of literary texts

Contents

Introduction: space and literary studies, Elizabeth F. Evans

Part I. Origins Revisited:

1. Representation, Andrew Thacker

2. Mapping: cheap maps, spatial politics and England's colonies, Kat Lecky

3. Space, disciplinary power and the novel, Philip Howell

4. Public/private: the spatial form of love and labor in the English novel, Nancy Armstrong and Matthew Taft

5. Urban/Rural, Klaudia Hiu Yen Lee

Part II. Developments:

6. Gender, space and feminist geography, Radost Rangelova

7. Plantation: toward a literary history of race, space, and capital in the Anglo-world, Jared Hickman and Aaron Begg

8. Empire, nation and the question of space. Sandeep Banerjee and Atreyee Majumder

9. Postcolonial space: African literary writing and the articulations of worlding, Madhu Krishnan

10. Borders and the liminal, Mary Pat Brady

11. Encountering the community in third space, Megan Jeanette Myers

12. Literary mobilities and the mobilization of space, Charlotte Mathieson

13. Translocality and translocalism, James Mulholland

14. Psychogeography, Joshua Armstrong

15. Mapping empire's horror: literary gis and colonial spatial logic, Alexander Sherman

Part III. Applications and Extensions:

16. Islands, oceans and the production of spatial theory, Johannes Riquet

17. Other/world(ly): a black ecology of outer space, Stefanie K. Dunning

18. Imaginary space, Siobhan Carroll

19. Digital Space, Peta Mitchell

20. Sensory geographies, Sheila Hones

21. Orientations, Eve Sorum

Elizabeth F. Evans, Wayne State University, Detroit, works on modernism, literary and cultural geography, and the digital humanities. Her first book, Threshold Modernism: New Public Women and the Literary Spaces of Imperial London (Cambridge UP, 2019), examines gender and space in writing by British and colonial authors.