Teaching and Learning Guide for

This guide accompanies the following article: Sheila Hones, Text as it happens – literary geography, Geography Compass 3 (2009): pp 1‐6. 10.1111/j.1749‐8198.2009.00291.x 1. Author’s Introduction One of the major challenges to the development of literary geography as a coherent geographical field has been the extent to which work attempting to link literary texts and literary studies with geographical interests and spatial theory has varied according to discipline, methodological orientation, era, academic context and scholarly purpose. This history of diversity has also inhibited the development of cross‐disciplinary literary‐geographical work. Thrift’s (2006) four propositions about space offer one potentially accommodating framework for work in literary geography. First, he argues that space is everywhere and everything is spatial. This is an important reminder that space is the key to narrative generally, and hence that literary geography involves much more than the analysis of landscape description and setting. It also usefully directs attention towards extra‐textual geographies relating to manuscript production, book distribution, canon formation, and academic criticism. Second, he emphasises the point that spatial boundaries are permeable. Fiction leaks into the real, and vice versa: stories have settings, for example, and settings have stories. Additionally, as texts become activated in varying contexts, those text events bring writers, readers, texts, and books together in ways that render them inseparable and mutually influential. Third, he notes that space is not static but always in motion. This suggests not only that writers, readers, texts and books themselves are literally mobile but also that narrative strategy itself always produces a mobile and unfixed time‐space geography. Finally, space is not singular: there are many kinds of space and these various spatial dimensions co‐exist heterarchically. We can make this directly relevant to literary geography first in terms of textually mediated geographies (as for example as in Brosseau’s distinction between the geographies ‘in’ the novel and the geographies ‘of’’ the novel) and second in relation to geographies of shared readings, knowledge production, and reader response. Thrift, N. (2006) Space. Theory, Culture and Society 23 (2–3), pp. 139–146. 2. Background Reading This list introduces some of the key English‐language commentaries on and reviews of the field within social and cultural geography. 1. Wright, J. K. (1924). Geography in literature. Geographical Review 14 (84), pp. 659–660. In this unsigned two‐page comment, Wright introduces evidence of the ‘geographical instinct’ of writers who have ‘trained themselves to visualize even more clearly than the professional geographer those regional elements of the earth’s surface most significant to the general run of humanity’. 2. Salter, C. L., and Lloyd, W. J. (1977). Landscape in literature . Resource Papers for College Geography 76‐3. Washington, DC: Association of American Geographers. Concentrating on the use of literary texts in the geography classroom, this focuses on how ‘signatures of the cultural landscape’ are made visible in fictional settings: the aim is to ‘see patterns more clearly in literature and landscape’ in order to appreciate ‘how completely mankind has been responsible for the form of the world we live in’. 3. Tuan, Y.‐F. (1978). Literature and geography: implications for geographical research. In: Ley, D., & Samuels, M. S. (eds) Humanistic geography . Chicago: Maaroufa Press, pp. 194–206. Tuan argues that ‘literary art serves the geographer in three principal ways’: (i) as ‘a thought experiment’ suggesting topics of study; (ii) as an artefact in the history of ideas; (iii) as a model for geographical work that balances the subjective and the objective. 4. Thrift, N. (1978). Landscape and literature. Letters to the editor. Environment and Planning A 10, pp. 347–349. In this response to Salter and Lloyd’s Landscape in literature , Thrift characterizes the practice of working with chunks of decontextualized landscape description as a form of ‘stamp collecting’. 5. Barrell, J. (1982). Geographies of Hardy’s Wessex. Journal of Historical Geography 8, pp. 347–361. This article focuses on the way in which Hardy’s narrative method manages to hold irreconcilable spatial ‘modes of knowing’ in tension in the juxtaposition of various narrative voices and in the projection of an impossibly complex implied reader. 6. Silk, J. (1984). Beyond geography and literature. Environment and Planning D 2, pp. 151–178. Silk argues for a materialist analysis as a challenge to bourgeois ideology, recommending feminism, regionalism, separatism, nationalism, and landscape or environmental appreciation as appropriate research themes for literary geography. 7. Mallory, W. E. and Simpson‐Housley, P. (1987). Geography and literature: a meeting of the disciplines . Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press. This collection, which includes essays by geographers, literary critics and literary authors, sets out to ‘bridge the gap between the geographer’s factual descriptions and the writer’s flights of imagination’. The introductory essay by J.W. Miller makes the case for a regionalist approach to literary geography. 8. Pocock, D. C. D. (1988). Geography and literature. Progress in Human Geography 12 (1), pp. 87–102. Pocock characterises geography’s ‘interface with literature’ as having two main dimensions: (i) ‘substantive or data‐seeking’ and (ii) ‘methodological or philosophical’. He distinguishes geographical contributions to literary criticism from the work of the ‘geographer qua geographer’, which he argues should focus not on particular authors but on the study of ‘an area, topic or people’. 9. Brosseau, M. (1994). Geography’s literature. Progress in Human Geography 18, pp. 333–353. Brosseau builds on a review of ‘how literature was integrated into the broader intellectual agenda of geographers’ to argue that literary geography has been characterised by ‘the partial silencing of the literary text as a text’. He calls for more attention to be paid to the ways in which texts generate ‘norms, particular models of readibility, that produce a particular kind of geography’. 10. Sharp, J. (2000). Towards a critical analysis of fictive geographies. Area 32 (3), pp. 327–334. Although acknowledging the difficulties of assessing the ways in which non‐specialist audiences actually read and respond to fiction, Sharp emphasises the need to include studies of reception, consumption and social impact as well as interpretative criticism in literary geography. For comparative cross‐disciplinary purposes, see for example: Blair, S. (1998). Cultural geography and the place of the literary. American Literary History

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