Rethinking Place through Literary Form

Rethinking Place Through Literary Form regards the relationship between place and linguistic form as challenging real and perceived configurations of place and renegotiating geopolitically determined categories of the ‘centre’ and ‘periphery’. The volume argues that the rise of scattered communities, displaced physically and psychologically by urban and alienated geographies, necessitates linguistic negotiations of one’s locatedness in place as the chief means of uncovering and re-building identity. By looking at narrative re-imaginings of forgotten and interrupted intimacies between habitation and place from diverse parts of the world, the twelve chapters address the growing need to expand and alter approaches to literary representations of modernity and modes of self-location. 

Introduction The Interdiscursive Connectedness of Place and Identity: A Framework for the Dispersal and Acceptance of Creative Value, Rupsa Banerjee and Nathaniel Cadle.- Part 1: Permeable Places.- Chapter 1 The Gendered Contours of the Pre-Independence Communist Everyday: Sulekha Sanyal's Nabankur, Nandini Dhar.- Chapter 2 “Her Strong Roots Sink Down”: Migration and Form in Jean Toomer’s Cane, David Sugarman.- Chapter 3 Poetry, the State and the Short Form: A Study of Martín Rodríguez’s Ministerio de desarrollo social (2018), Carolina Baffi.- Chapter 4 Formal Reconstitutions of Geographical Place: A Reading of Peter Riley’s Excavations and Greek Passages, Rupsa Banerjee.- Part 2: Places of Statelessness.- Chapter 5 “Because I Think You May Be Human”: Liberal Humanist Interventionism in the Post-Imperial Space of D. J. Enright’s Poetry, Aaron Deveson.- Chapter 6 De-Provincializing Liolà: Pirandello, Futurism, and Dialectics in Gramsci’s Cultural Writings, Jennifer Kang.- Chapter 7 Statelessness as Utopia:  B. Traven and the Anarchist Novel, Nathaniel Cadle.- Part 3: Emplacement in Language.- Chapter 8 Island of Words, Nigel Wheale.- Chapter 9 “Earthquakes or Earthmovers”: Los Angeles’ Eastside Barrio and Helena María Viramontes’ Their Dogs Came With Them, Cristina Rodriguez.- Chapter 10 “A House with Many Rooms”: The Long Way Home in Dinaw Mengestu’s All Our Names, Laura Savu Walker.- Chapter 11 The Invisible City of the Creole Caribbean, Allyson Ferrante.- Chapter 12 Disarticulated Forms of Subjectivity and Place in Philip Roth’s The Anatomy Lesson, Iven Heister.

Rupsa Banerjee is Assistant Professor of English at St. Xavier's University, Kolkata, India. 

Nathaniel Cadle is Associate Professor of English at Florida International University, USA. His first book, The Mediating Nation:  Late American Realism, Globalization, and the Progressive State (2014), won the 2015 SAMLA Studies Book Award.