Space and Literary Studies

Examines the evolving role of space as a concept in literary studies while emphasizing its intersection with power.

Elizabeth Evans (Edited by)

9781009424240, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 22 May 2025

391 pages
23.5 x 15.9 x 2.8 cm, 0.74 kg

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.

List of figures
List of contributors
Acknowledgements
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 by 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
Index.

Subject Areas: Literary theory [DSA]