Literary Geography: Theory and Practice – serie

In the second half of the twentieth century, American readers of Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories – known as Sherlockians – worked together to create a ‘world of Sherlock Holmes’ that crossed the boundary between reality and fiction. This book applies an innovative literary-geographical lens, informed both by geographical theories of spatiality as a process and literary scholarship readers’ active roles in making stories happen, to define the contours of a world in which the ontological boundary ordinarily assumed between the actual and the fictional bend, blur and break. Drawing extensively on the University of Minnesota’s Sherlock Holmes Collections, the world’s largest archive of Sherlockiana, this book aims to shine light on Sherlockian activities in the mid- to late-twentieth century. This is a relatively understudied but creatively rich period, in which the imaginative foundations of the fandom as we know it were laid. In these years, the world of Sherlock Holmes was collectively created by readers through a variety of textual and embodied practices: writing, mapping, playing and walking.

Interspatiality is a book about the language, theory and practice of a literary geography that takes as its subject matter the inseparability of writing, reading and living. It explores ways of engaging with interrelated textual-social-spatial processes, working with the problem of how to appreciate these processes as inseparable, how to articulate the complex spatialities they generate, and how to convey their presence, power and significance in literary texts. With a focus on literary geography as something inhabited as well as studied, the book draws attention to the interspatiality of routine daily life – a mundane literary geography – in surroundings that are made up of the real and imagined, of stories as well as locations, storied locations and located stories.