Deep Locational Criticism

A lively series of spatial turns in literary studies since the 1990s give rise to this engaged and practical book, devoted to the question of how to teach and study the relationship between all sorts of literature and all sorts of location. Among the many concrete examples explored are texts created between the early seventeenth and the early twenty-first centuries, in genres ranging from stage drama and lyric poetry to television, by way of several studies of fiction definable in a broad way as realist. Writers and thinkers discussed include Michel de Certeau, Edward Casey, Gwendolyn Brooks, Christina Rossetti, Dickens, J. Hillis Miller, Lynne Reid Banks, Heidegger, Shakespeare, Thomas Middleton, Thomas Dekker, Stephen C. Levinson, Bernard Malamud, E.M. Forster, Thomas Burke and Samuel Beckett. The approach draws on the philosophical topology of Jeff Malpas as a way of getting to grips with the experiential qualities of located lives as they are recorded and constructed discursively. The book is aimed at students and teachers of literary place at all university levels.