Geocritical Explorations: Space, Place, and Mapping in Literary and Cultural Studies (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011).

In recent years the spatial turn in literary and cultural studies has opened up new ways of looking at the interactions among writers, readers, texts, and places. Geocriticism offers a timely new approach, and Geocritical Explorations: Space, Place, and Mapping in Literary and Cultural Studies presents an array of concrete examples or readings, which also reveal the broad range of geocritical practices. Representing various areas of literary and cultural studies, as well as different parts of the globe and multiple types of space, Geocritical Explorations provides a succinct overview of geocriticism and a point of departure for further exploration.
Contents: Foreword by Bertrand Westphal; Introduction: On Geocriticism – Robert T. Tally Jr.; Part I. Geocriticism in Theory and Practice; 1. Geocriticism, Geopoetics, Geophilosophy, and Beyond – Eric Prieto; 2. The Presencing of Place in Literature: Towards an Embodied Topopoetic Mode of Reading – Sten Pultz Moslund; Part II. Places, Spaces, & Texts; 3. Redrawing the Map: An Interdisciplinary Geocritical Approach to Australian Cultural Narratives – Peta Mitchell & Jane Stadler; 4. Textual Forests: The Representation of Landscape in Latin American Narratives – Maria Mercedes Ortiz Rodriguez; 5. Land of Racial Confluence and Spatial Accessibility: Claude McKay’s Sense of Mediterranean Place – Michael K. Walonen; 6. The Shores of Aphrodite’s Island: Cyprus and European Travel Memory – Antoine Eche; 7. Jefferson’s Ecologies of Exception: Geography, Race, and American Empire in the Age of Globalization – Christine M. Battista; Part III. Transgressions, Movements, & Border Crossings;8. Geopolitics, Landscape, and Guilt in Nineteenth-Century Colonial Literature – Rebecca Weaver-Hightower; 9. “Amid all the maze, uproar and novelty”: The Limits of Other-Space in Sister Carrie – Rachel Collins; 10. Furrowing the Soil With His Pen: Derek Walcott’s Topography of the English Countryside – Joanna Johnson; 11. Global Positioning from Spain: Mapping Identity in African American Narratives of Travel – Maria C. Ramos; 12. The Space of Transgression: A Geocritical Study of Albert Camus’s “The Adulterous Woman” – Brigitte La Juez; 13. Affective Mapping in Lyric Poetry – Heather Yeung.
Praise for Geocritical Explorations:
“Geocritical Explorations is the necessary companion volume to Bertrand Westphal's Geocriticism, as well as a notable contribution in its own right to our understanding of the spatial turn in contemporary literary criticism. Taking Westphal's theorization of ‘geocriticism’ as their point of departure, the authors of the essays collected here offer provocative reflections on the theory and practice of putting ‘place’ at the center of our thinking about literature. Ranging across the cartography, ecology, insularity, frontiers, topography, and many other aspects of places on five different continents as figured in fiction and nonfiction, poetry and prose, the essays in this volume demonstrate that place is never a simple matter, just a neglected one.” Ricardo Padrón, University of Virginia, and author of The Spacious Word: Cartography, Literature, and Empire in Early Modern Spain
“As the spatial turn gathers momentum within literary studies, Geocritical Explorations offers a splendid snapshot of current work, featuring thirteen essays that range across the world, attentive to nuances of text and place, but also advancing theoretical reflection about approaches to literary geography. This book will certainly help put geocriticism firmly on the contemporary map.” Peter Hulme, University of Essex