Geography and Literature

Evocative descriptions of geographical places by novelists and poets are of great benefit both to students of literature and geography. They foster a deeper appreciation of the essences of and they frequently allow a sense of place to be felt more strongly by the reader.

Geography and Literature is a uniquely interdisciplinary effort. The essays of distinguished creative writers, literary critics, and geographers, appraising literary places, demonstrate that literary landscapes are rooted in reality, and that the geographer’s knowledge can help ground even highly symbolic literary landscapes
in this reality.

The book is divided into five sections, based on various approaches to landscape or place in literature. The domain is wide and includes such diverse areas as José Maria Arguedas’s Peru, Turgenev’s Russia, Bennett’s Stoke-on-Trent, Cather’s Nebraska, and Chrétien de Troyes’s symbolic Arthurian landscapes. Contributors
include César Caviedes, Jim Wayne Miller, Kenneth Mitchell, D. C. D. Pocock, Peter Preston, and Susan J. Rosowski.

Students of geography and literature should find the collection useful. The avid student of human, social, cultural, and historical geography will become aware of factors exogamous to geography that stimulate appraisal and appreciation of place-and one of them is literary description. Similarly, the student of literature will gain an awareness of the actual or factual basis of a geographer’s appraisal.

Ultimately, it is hoped, such a collection can bridge the gap between the geographer’s factual descriptions and the writer’s flights of imagination, hence giving the world—both in geographical and literary terms—a more unified shape.