Geographical Imaginations Literature and the 'Spatial Turn'

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.

1 - Introduction: Literary Geographies/ Geographies of Literature
2 - Sense of Place: Humanistic Geography, Literature and Spatial Identity
3 - Literature's Non-places: Making and Unmaking of Literary Places
4 - Other Places: Literature and Non-Human Places
5 - Geography of Exclusion: Marginal Geography in Literature
6 - Conclusion: Quest for Relevance

Dr Indranil Acharya is Professor and former Head of the Department of English, Vidyasagar University, West Bengal. He completed three UGC Projects as Principal Investigator on Australian and Indian Indigenous folklore in 2008, 2015 and 2017 respectively. He had also been the Deputy Coordinator of the UGC-SAP programme in the Department of English (2009-2014) and State Coordinator of the People's Linguistic Survey of India since 2009. Dr Acharya is the only Bengali academic to have conducted cultural cartographic survey of twenty five indigenous communities of Bengal. Dr. Ujjwal Kr. Panda is an Assistant Professor in the WBES and Head in the Department of English at Govt. General Degree College, Dantan-II which is affiliated to Vidyasagar University, Midnapore, West Bengal.