Géographie et littérature
Literary Geographies – Virtual Theme Issue « Society and Space – Environment and Planning D
►http://societyandspace.com/2012/09/26/literary-geographie
September 26, 2012
If Geography is sometimes said to be about placing things in context, how does it engage with the question of text? While there have been many debates about the texts of theory, here the emphasis is on literary texts—plays, poems, and novels. Literary theory has proved useful for geographical debates, with deconstruction, new historicism, cultural studies, feminism, Marxism and structuralism proving influential at different times. A classic example from this journal is James Duncan and Nancy Duncan’s discussion of the uses of literary theory to read landscapes (1988). Rather here we want to look at how geographers – whether within the discipline Geography or without – have read works of literature.
An early issue of this journal published a kind of theoretical manifesto by John Silk (1984) for going beyond existing approaches to Geography and Literature: a piece regularly referenced in subsequent discussions of this topic (see also Pocock 1988). It is made available again here. Silk co-wrote a later book looking at portrayals of African-Americans in American popular culture, both film and fiction (1990). A list of books or book chapters on geography and literature would be vast, but geographical perspectives have also been offered in multiple journals in the field. They range from classic established literary authors and texts such as Shakespeare (Mayhew 1998; Chamberlain 2001; Elden forthcoming); Orwell’s 1984 (Tyner 2004); Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses (Sharp 1996); Beowulf (Elden 2009); Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (Barnett 1996); and Kerouac’s On the Road (Cresswell 1993), to the more recent, genre-specific, challenging or unusual (Buckley 1996; Gilbert 1996; Doel 2001; Kitchin and Kneale eds. 2002; Closs-Stephens 2011; Kneale 2006, 2011; Brown 2006; Romanillos 2008; Dittmer 2010). There have been some previous collections in journals on this theme – GeoJournal (1996) and the Cahiers de géographie du Québec (2008). Recently Sheila Hones and James Kneale have created the Literary Geographies blog – which with its extensive bibliographies has quickly become the authoritative reference point for work in this area.