Geocriticism Real and Fictional Spaces

by Westphal, Bertrand; Tally, Robert T., Jr.

• ISBN13: 9780230110212
• ISBN10: 0230110215
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2011-04-15
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan

Summary

Originally published in French as La geocritique: reel, fiction, espace.

Author Biography

Bertrand Westphal is a Professor of General and Comparative Literature at the Université de Limoges where he directs the “Espaces Humains et Interactions Culturelles” research team.  He is the author of numerous works on geocriticism, Austrian literature, the Mediterranean, and the theory of the novel. 

Robert T. Tally Jr. is an Assistant Professor of English at Texas State University. He is the author of Melville, Mapping and Globalization: Literary Cartography in the American Baroque Writer and Kurt Vonnegut and the American Novel: A Postmodern Iconography, as well as the editor of Geocritical Explorations: Space, Place, and Mapping in Literary and Cultural Studies (Palgrave Macmillan).

Table of Contents

“The transdisciplinary spatial turn explodes globally in Geocriticism, a stunning literary tour-de-force that explores real and fictional spaces everywhere on earth. There is no one better than Westphal to interweave the Francophonic and Anglophonic geographical imaginations in ways that enhance our understanding of how geography and literature are critically related. This valuable translation opens the floodgates to European spatial thinking, while at the same time building creatively on the critical geographical literature available in English.”--Edward Soja, Professor Emeritus of Urban Planning, UCLA

“When you say you know a city, Paris, for example, how do you separate your flesh-and-blood visits there from your visits to the literary Paris of Baudelaire, of Dickens, of Hemingway? Do all those writers, and the multitude of other writers who have written about Paris, write about the same city? These are among the sorts of marvelous questions about the identity and difference of reality and representation, of sensation and memory, of life and fiction, which Bertrand Westphal’s Geocriticism investigates with deftness and rigor. Drawing on postmodern critical currents in philosophy and geography as well as in literary studies, Westphal examines a vast multilingual corpus of literary and cinematic examples to illuminate the field lying at the intersection of lived and imagined space.”--John Protevi, Professor of French Studies, Louisiana State University