Space and Literary Studies
Edited by Elizabeth F. Evans
Cambridge UP, 2025
ISBN: 9781009424240
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.
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- 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.
