Neal Alexander – författare

The Routledge Handbook of Literary Geographies provides a comprehensive overview of recent research and a range of innovative ways of thinking literature and geography together. It maps the history of literary geography and identifies key developments and debates in the field.Written by leading and emerging scholars from around the world, the 38 chapters are organised into six themed sections, which consider: differing critical methodologies; keywords and concepts; literary geography in the light of literary history; a variety of places, spaces, and landforms; the significance of literary forms and genres; and the role of literary geographies beyond the academy. Presenting the work of scholars from different disciplinary backgrounds, each section offers readers new angles from which to view the convergence of literary creativity and geographical thought. Collectively, the contributors also address some of the major issues of our time including the climate emergency, movement and migration, and the politics of place.Literary geography is a dynamic interdisciplinary field dedicated to exploring the complex relationships between geography and literature. This cutting-edge collection will be an essential resource for undergraduate and postgraduate students in both Geography and Literary Studies, and scholars interested in the evolving interface between the two disciplines.

This monograph offers a decisive reappraisal of both the literary history and the literary geography of Anglophone modernism by focusing attention on poetry from both sides of the Atlantic. Where recent studies of late modernism tend to regard it as an inter-war or mid-century phenomenon, this book contends that the period 1945 1975 marks a major phase of experiment and achievement in late modernist poetry. The author argues that what distinguishes the work of many late modernist poets (such as Gwendolyn Brooks, Basil Bunting, W. S. Graham, David Jones, Lorine Niedecker and Charles Olson) during this period is its multi-layered poetics of place. In part, he suggests, this is due to the engagement of individual writers with contemporary developments in human and physical geography. It is also manifest in the tendency of late modernist poets to foreground the cultural significance of regional and non-metropolitan places in their texts.

This monograph offers a decisive reappraisal of both the literary history and the literary geography of Anglophone modernism by focusing attention on poetry from both sides of the Atlantic. Where recent studies of late modernism tend to regard it as an inter-war or mid-century phenomenon, this book contends that the period 1945 1975 marks a major phase of experiment and achievement in late modernist poetry. The author contends that what distinguishes the work of many late modernist poets (such as Gwendolyn Brooks, Basil Bunting, W. S. Graham, David Jones, Lorine Niedecker and Charles Olson) during this period is its multi-layered poetics of place. In part, he suggests, this is due to the engagement of individual writers with contemporary developments in human and physical geography. It is also manifest in the tendency of late modernist poets to foreground the cultural significance of regional and non-metropolitan places in their texts.

An Open Access edition of this book is available on the Liverpool University Press website and the OAPEN library.Ciaran Carson is one of the most challenging and inventive of contemporary Irish writers, exhibiting verbal brilliance, formal complexity, and intellectual daring across a remarkably varied body of work. This study considers the full range of his oeuvre, in poetry, prose, and translations, and discusses the major themes to which he returns, including: memory and history, narrative, language and translation, mapping, violence, and power. It argues that the singularity of Carson’s writing is to be found in his radical imaginative engagements with ideas of space and place. The city of Belfast, in particular, occupies a crucially important place in his texts, serving as an imaginative focal point around which his many other concerns are constellated. The city, in all its volatile mutability, is an abiding frame of reference and a reservoir of creative impetus for Carson’s imagination. Accordingly, the book adopts an interdisciplinary approach that draws upon geography, urbanism, and cultural theory as well as literary criticism. It provides both a stimulating and thorough introduction to Carson’s work, and a flexible critical framework for exploring literary representations of space.

Poetry & Geography examines the rich diversity of geographical imaginations informing post-war and contemporary poetry in Britain and Ireland. Drawing impetus from the spatial turn in the humanities and social sciences, the fourteen essays collected here appraise the significance of ideas of space, place, and landscape for ‘mainstream’ and ‘experimental’ poets, post-romantics and neo-modernists alike. Cumulatively, the book’s varied articulations of poetry and geography sketch out a series of intersections between language and location, form and environment, sound and space. Poetry’s unique capacity to invigorate and expand our vocabularies of site and situation, of our manifold relations with the world outside us, is described and explored. Bringing together fresh, interdisciplinary readings of poets as diverse as Roy Fisher and R.S. Thomas, John Burnside and Thomas Kinsella, Jo Shapcott and Peter Riley, Alice Oswald and Ciaran Carson, Poetry & Geography sketches a topographical map of shared poetic terrains. It contributes to a fertile set of dialogues between literary studies and cultural geography in which the valences of space and place are open to processes of contestation and reimagining. This new collection of critical essays provides readers with a vital set of coordinates in a complex and evolving field. Key themes include: place and identity; literary cartographies; walking as trope and spatial practice; the poetics of edges, margins, and peripheries; landscape, language, and form.