Literary Cartographies: Spatiality, Representation, and Narrative

by Robert T. Tally Jr. (Editor)

Overview

Exploring narrative mapping in a wide range of literary works, ranging from medieval romance to postmodern science fiction, this volume argues for the significance of spatiality in comparative literary studies. Contributors demonstrate how a variety of narratives represent the changing social spaces of their world.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781137456496
Publisher:	Palgrave Macmillan US
Publication date:	09/18/2014
Series:	Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies
Edition description:	2014
Pages:	236
Product dimensions:	5.60(w) x 8.60(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

Myles Chilton, Nihon University, Japan Susan E. Cook, Southern New Hampshire University, USA Jeanette Goddard, University of Wisconsin, Madison, USA Heather McNaugher, Chatham University, USA John G. Peters, University of North Texas, USA Jenny Pyke, Mount Holyoke College, USA Shawna Ross, Arizona State University, USA Robert Allen Rouse, University of British Columbia, Canada Derek Schilling, John Hopkins University, USA Barbara E. Thornbury, Temple University, USA Rhona Trauvitch, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, USA Alice Tsay, University of Michigan, USA Anne B. Wallen, University of Kansas, USA

Table of Contents

Introduction: Mapping Narratives; Robert T. Tally Jr. 1. What Lies Between?: Thinking Through Medieval Narrative Spatiality; Robert Allen Rouse 2. Plotting One's Position in Don Quijote : Literature and the Process of Cognitive Mapping; Jeanette E. Goddard 3. "Eyes that have dwelt on the past": Reading the Landscape of Memory in The Mill on the Floss ; Alice Tsay 4. Mapping Hardy and Brontë; Susan Cook 5. "She sought a spiritual heir": Cosmopolitanism and the Pre-suburban in Howards End ; Heather McNaugher 6. The Space of Russia in Joseph Conrad's Under Western Eyes ; John G. Peters 7. "History, Mystery, Leisure, Pleasure": Evelyn Waugh, Bruno Latour, and the Ocean Liner; Shawna Ross 8. To the South England, to the West Eternity: Mapping Boundlessness in Modern Scottish Fiction; Jenny Pyke 9. Leaving the Landscape: Mapping Elsewhereness in Canadian City Literature; Myles Chilton 10. Mapping Tokyo's "Empty Center" in Oyama's A Man with No Talents ; Barbara E. Thornbury 11. Mapping the Personal in Contemporary German Literature; Anne B. Wallen 12. Charting the Extraordinary: Sentient and Transontological Spaces; Rhona Trauvitch 13. On and Off the Map: Literary Narrative as Critique of Cartographic Reason; Derek Schilling

Editorial Reviews

"We are accustomed to thinking of maps as narratives as visual accounts of the cultures that produce them. But the wide-ranging, incisive essays in Robert J. Tally's interdisciplinary new collection not only reverse this proposition by reading narratives as maps, but they go a step further to suggest that map-making is what narratives do: they are 'mapping machines'." - Modernism/modernity

"This is a timely and exciting collection, edited by a leading light in the field of literary cartography and geocriticism. Literary Cartographies is ambitious in its scope (both geographic and temporal), but beautifully focused on its central question: the 'degree to which the writing of literary texts is itself a cartographic endeavor.' The collection takes the reader from the spaces and spatiality of medieval narratives to those of globalised postmodernity, with each essay not only focusing on the particularities of their individual time-space-text nexus, but also making an important contribution to the central problematic. Literary Cartographies will be an important and defining text in the field of literary cartography." - Peta Mitchell, Senior Research Fellow, Creative Industries Faculty, Queensland University of Technology, Australia

"This is a valuable and timely collection. At a moment when spatial theory has well and truly come of age and has become an established subdiscipline within textual studies, not to mention the critical humanities as a whole, this volume provides a useful glimpse of the state of the art. It does not merely give an overview of possible spatial approaches to a broad range of literary periods, genres, and traditions. More provocatively, it shows literary spatial analysis testing its own limits and turning a critical gaze upon its own assumptions and methodologies. It thus demonstrates how disciplinary innovation can continue to whet its cutting edge and sharpen its sense of intellectual adventure." - Russell West Pavlov, Professor of English, University of Tübingen, Germany

"Literary Cartographies is a superb volume that establishes geocriticism as an exciting and innovative approach to literary studies. The book is capacious in its coverage, with a set of stimulating essays that discuss topics such as medieval narrative, ocean liners in modernism, and mapping in fiction about Tokyo. This volume shows wonderfully the many subtle ways in which spatiality is a key feature of all literary texts." - Andrew Thacker, Professor of English, Nottingham Trent University, UK

From the Publisher