Geographical Imaginations: Literature and the 'Spatial Turn'

By: Indranil Acharya and Ujjwal Kumar Panda

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Synopsis: Matters of space, spatiality, geography, topography and place have mostly remained neglected in modern scholarship and teaching because in most modern and postmodern literary criticism history and temporality have been dominating discourses. But in recent criticism the "when" and "what" of literature yield place to "where" as Michel Foucault declared the present time as "the epoch of space". Literature reflects a spirit of place and a sense of place because place is known and given meaning when it is felt and closely experienced by human beings living in it. This humanistic geographical emphasis on human experience of place opens up the possibility of an interdisciplinary study of literature of geography. Literature creates and recreates geography in its own way and there are many ways of looking at literary representation of space and place. The book is meant to offer a good introduction to those divergent ways in which space, place, topography and geography evince themselves in literature.