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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 this book presents an array of concrete examples or readings, which also reveal the broad range of geocritical practices.

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Foreword; B.Westphal Introduction: On Geocriticism; R.T.Tally Jr. PART I: GEOCRITICISM IN THEORY AND PRACTICE Geocriticism, Geopoetics, Geophilosophy, and Beyond; E.Prieto The Presencing of Place in Literature: Towards an Embodied Topopoetic Mode of Reading; S.Pultz Moslund PART II: PLACES, SPACES, TEXTS Redrawing the Map: An Interdisciplinary Geocritical Approach to Australian Cultural Narratives; P.Mitchell & J.Stadler Textual Forests: The Representation of Landscape in Latin American Narratives; M.Mercedes Ortiz Rodriguez Land of Racial Confluence and Spatial Accessibility: Claude McKay´s Sense of Mediterranean Place; M.K.Walonen The Shores of Aphrodite´s Island: Cyprus and European Travel Memory; A.Eche Jefferson´s Ecologies of Exception: Geography, Race, and American Empire in the Age of Globalization; C.M.Battista PART III: TRANSGRESSIONS, MOVEMENTS, BORDER CROSSINGS Geopolitics, Landscape, and Guilt in Nineteenth-Century Colonial Literature; R.Weaver-Hightower "Amid all the maze, uproar and novelty": The Limits of Other-Space in Sister Carrie; R.Collins Furrowing the Soil With His Pen: Derek Walcott´s Topography of the English Countryside; J.Johnson Global Positioning from Spain: Mapping Identity in African American Narratives of Travel; M.C.Ramos The Space of Transgression: A Geocritical Study of Albert Camus´s "The Adulterous Wife"; B.La Juez Affective Mapping in Lyric Poetry; H.Yeung

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´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, Professor, University of Essex, UK

"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. They teach us fruitful ways to attend to place in literature, and thereby to recover its role in the making of our world." - Ricardo Padrón, Associate Professor of Spanish, University of Virginia, USA, and author of The Spacious Word: Cartography, Literature, and Empire in Early Modern Spain

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