Spatial Practices – serie

Of all European cities, Americans today are perhaps most curious about Berlin, whose position in the American imagination is an essential component of nineteenth-century, postwar and contemporary transatlantic imagology. Over various periods, Berlin has been a tenuous space for American claims to cultural heritage and to real geographic space in Europe, symbolizing the ultimate evil and the power of redemption. This volume offers a comprehensive examination of the city’s image in American literature from 1840 to the present. Tracing both a history of Berlin and of American culture through the ways the city has been narrated across three centuries by some 100 authors through 145 novels, short stories, plays and poems, Tales of Berlin presents a composite landscape not only of the German capital, but of shifting subtexts in American society which have contextualized its meaning for Americans in the past, and continue to do so today.

English Topographies in Literature and Culture takes a spatial approach to the study of English culture. In order to gain a fresh perspective on constructions of English cultural identity, the collection treats geography, social spaces and spatial practices as well as representations of space and place as complex constellations termed ‘cultural topographies’. Individual contributions focus on writing landscapes, London psychogeography, heritage discourses, urban planning, and idiosyncratic spatial practices such as suburban gardening. In line with the ‘affective turn’, the investigated cultural topographies transcend the dichotomy between the material and the immaterial through embodiment and embeddedness, displaying a ‘new sensitivity’ in textual, visual and aural representations that seek to transcend an anthropocentric perspective. Space thus emerges as both political and shaped by affect.

London post-2010 in British Literature and Culture explores cultural and literary representations of London since around 2010 and focuses on a period in which a string of celebratory national and global media events, but also riots and anti-capitalist protests have cemented London’s status as a paradigmatic world city. This collection of articles brings together a wide variety of topics, such as the 2011 London riots, the London Olympics of 2012, royal festivities, the Tube anniversary, memorials, and London in recent novels and blockbuster films. The contributions look at the way in which cultural and literary texts articulate competing versions of the contemporary city, oscillating between either supporting or subverting the hegemonic narrative of London as a place of cosmopolitan harmony and inclusion.

Writing London and the Thames Estuary is an ambitious study of place and identity which resonates deeply against the troubled politics of contemporaneity. Drawing on a broad range of cultural materials including novels, film, theatre, tourist literature, topography, chorology and sociological writing, Len Platt traces the making of the estuary as margin by a metropolis that has been dependent on this region, sometimes for its very survival. Drawing on writers and artists ranging from Middleton, Defoe, Pepys, Dickens, Conrad and T.S. Eliot through to such contemporary figures as Iain Sinclair, Nicola Barker, Tracy Emin and Billy Childish, Platt offers a fascinating insight into the formation of ‘estuary grotesque’, the social dismissal out of which post-Brexit politics have emerged to such controversy.

The essays collected in this volume unfold a panorama of urban phenomena of resistance that reach from the seventeenth to the twenty-first centuries, thus revealing the essential vulnerability of urban space to all forms of subversion. Taking their readers to diverse places and moments in history, the contributions remind us of the struggles over the concrete as well as the imaginary space we call the city. The collection maps the various challenges experienced by urban communities, ranging from the unmistakably hegemonic claim of civic festivities in early modern London to the perceived threat posed by newly created parks in the Restoration period and from the dangers of criminality and riots in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to the transformation of the Berlin Wall into souvenirs scattered around the globe.Contributors: Ingo Berensmeyer, Christoph Ehland, Pascal Fischer, Blake Fitzpatrick, Kerstin Frank, Jens Martin Gurr, Bernd Hirsch, Marie Hologa, Mihaela Irimia, Stephan Kohl, Norbert Lennartz, Catharina Löffler, Margaret Olin, István Rácz, Gerd Stratmann.

Winner of the 2020 “Outstanding Academic Title” Award, created by Choice Magazine.In Negotiating Space in Latin America, edited by Patricia Vilches, contributors approach spatial practices from multidisciplinary angles. Drawing on cultural studies, film studies, gender studies, geography, history, literary studies, sociology, tourism, and current events, the volume advances innovative conceptualizations on spatiality and treats subjects that range from nineteenth century-nation formation to twenty-first century social movements.Latin America has endured multiple spatial transformations, which contributors analyze from the perspective of the urban, the rural, the market, and the political body. The essays collected here signal how spatial processes constantly shape societal interactions and illuminate the complex relationships between humans and space, emphasizing the role of spatiality in our actions and perceptions.Contributors: Gail A. Bulman, Ana María Burdach Rudloff, James Craine, Angela N. DeLutis-Eichenberger, Carolina Di Próspero, Gustavo Fares, Jennifer Hayward, Silvia Hirsch, Edward Jackiewicz, Magdalena Maiz-Peña, Lucía Melgar, Silvia Nagy-Zekmi, Luis H. Peña, Jorge Saavedra Utman, Rosa Tapia, Juan de Dios Torralbo Caballero, Tera Trujillo, Patricia Vilches, and Gareth Wood.

Picturing America: Photography and the Sense of Place argues that photography is a prevalent practice of making American places. Its collected essays epitomize not only how pictures situate us in a specific place, but also how they create a sense of such mutable place-worlds. Understanding photographs as prime sites of knowledge production and advocates of socio-political transformations, a transnational set of scholars reveals how images enact both our perception and conception of American environments. They investigate the power photography yields in shaping our ideas of self, nation, and empire, of private and public space, through urban, landscape, wasteland and portrait photography. The volume radically reconfigures how pictures alter the development of American places in the past, present, and future.

In Artistic Reconfigurations of Rome Kaspar Thormod examines how visions of Rome manifest themselves in artworks produced by international artists who have stayed at the city’s foreign academies. Structured as an alternative guide to Rome, the book represents an interdisciplinary approach to creating a dynamic visual history that brings into view facets of the city’s diverse contemporary character. Thormod demonstrates that when artists successfully reconfigure Rome they provide us with visions that, being anchored in a present, undermine the connotations of permanence and immovability that cling to the ‘Eternal City’ epithet. Looking at the work of these artists, the reader is invited to engage critically with the question: what is Rome today? – or perhaps better: what can Rome be?

Timescapes of Waiting explores the intersections of temporality and space by examining various manifestations of spatial (im-)mobility. The individual articles approach these spaces from a variety of academic perspectives – including the realms of history, architecture, law and literary and cultural studies – in order to probe the fluid relationships between power, time and space. The contributors offer discussion and analysis of waiting spaces like ante-chambers, prisons, hospitals, and refugee camps, and also of more elusive spaces such as communities and nation-states. Contributors: Olaf Berwald, Elise Brault-Dreux, Richard Hardack, Kerstin Howaldt, Robin Kellermann, Amanda Lagji, Margaret Olin, Helmut Puff, Katrin Röder, Christoph Singer, Cornelia Wächter, Robert Wirth.

This collection emphasizes a cross-disciplinary approach to the relevance of borders and bordering as a spatial paradigm in Anglophone studies. It sets out to provide a critical counter-narrative to the 1990s globalization argument of a “borderless” world by insisting on the significant roles borders play. The essays range in subject matter from geography, history, British and American literature to painting and Reggae music and map out different conceptualisations of the border: place, line, process, contact zones, etc. The volume’s cross-border “narrative” serves as a point of communication between the local and the global, between Europe and America, between different literary and artistic genres, thus challenging the divides of geography and literature, between “real” territorial borders and their “fictional” counterparts.

Literary Invention and the Cartographic Imagination: Early Modern to Late Modern is a wide-ranging, inter- and transdisciplinary approach grounded in the twin rigors of theory and history, which, through close readings of authors from Edmund Spenser to Olga Tokarczuk, and through considered discussions of the ideologies of walking and mapping, in performance art and cultural representation, assesses and analyses the significance of maps to literary texts, and which examines the ways in which the literary maps imaginary and real worlds. Together, the essays demonstrate convincingly the close relationship between text, map and culture.

In Modern Architecture, Empire, and Race in Fascist Italy, Brian L. McLaren examines the architecture of the late-Fascist era in relation to the various racial constructs that emerged following the occupation of Ethiopia in 1936 and intensified during the wartime. This study is conducted through a wide-ranging investigation of two highly significant state-sponsored exhibitions, the 1942 Esposizione Universale di Roma and 1940 Mostra Triennale delle Terre Italiane d'Oltremare. These exhibitions and other related imperial displays are examined over an extended span of time to better understand how architecture, art, and urban space, the politics and culture that encompassed them, the processes that formed them, and the society that experienced them, were racialized in varying and complex ways.

Geographies of Affect in Contemporary Literature and Visual Culture opens a dialogue between the literary and filmic works produced in Central Europe and in the Anglophone world. It relies on the concept of translocality to explore this corpus, offering new readings of contemporary Hungarian films as well as urban fiction and poetry in English. Calling attention to the role of affect in imagining city space, the volume investigates György Pálfi’s Taxidermia, Béla Tarr’s Family Nest, Teju Cole’s Open City, Toni Morrison’s Jazz, China Miéville’s Un Lun Dun, Chimamanda Adichie’s Americanah, and Patrick Neate’s City of Tiny Lights, among many other urban narratives. Contributors examine both widely explored emotions and under-researched affects, such as shame, fascination, and the role of withdrawal in contemporary literature and culture.Contributors: Tamás Bényei, Imola Bülgözdi, Fanni Feldmann, Zsolt Győri, Ágnes Györke, Brigitta Hudácskó, György Kalmár, Anna Kérchy, Márta Kőrösi, Jennifer Leetsch, Katalin Pálinkás, Miklós Takács, Pieter Vermeulen.

The Spatial Practices series is premised on the observation that places are inscribed with cultural meaning, not least of all in terms of collective constructions of identity. Such space-based constructions can manifest in material and immaterial, explicit and implicit forms of heritage, and they are crucial factors in the promotion of a group’s wellbeing. It is this intersection of spaces, heritage and wellbeing that the present volume takes at its object. It considers ways in which institutional spaces in their materiality as well as in their cultural inscriptions impact on the wellbeing of the subjects inhabiting them and explores how heritage comes to bear on these interrelations within specific institutions, such as prisons, hospitals or graveyards.

This book is an investigation of the widely overlooked photographic style of pictorialism in the American West between 1900 and 1950 and argues that western pictorialist photographers were regionalists that had their roots in the formidable photographic heritage of the nineteenth-century West. Driven by a wealth of textual and visual primary sources, the book addresses the West’s relationship with the eastern centers of art in the early century, the diversity of practitioners such as women, Japanese Americans, Indigenous Americans, western rural workers, etc., and the style’s final demise as it related to the modernism of Group F.64. Couched in the rhetoric of regionalism; it is a refreshing and innovative approach to an overlooked wealth of American cultural production.

This essay collection focuses on enclosure, deception and secrecy in three spatial areas – the body, clothing and furniture. It contributes to the study of private life and explores the micro-history of hidden spaces. The contents of pockets may prove a surer index to their owner’s real thoughts than anything they say; a piece of furniture with ingenious mechanisms created to conceal secrets may also reveal someone’s attempts to break in and thus give away as much as it holds. Though the book’s focus is on particular material or imagined objects, taken as a whole it exemplifies a range of interdisciplinary encounters between history, literary criticism, art history, philosophy, psychoanalysis, sociology, criminology, archival studies, museology and curating, and women’s studies.

This volume focuses on “walls” in cultural as much as material terms. It uncovers far-reaching notions of wall and border as landmarks of civilisation, but also as (necessary) boundaries for creativity. Barriers can separate human and non-human identities, but they can also segregate the “rejects” of society. The essays explore the ethical implications of walls in a range of historical periods and locations. The topics include British and American culture, classical music in Canada, fascist Italy, interwar France, German military history of World War II, and colonial North America in the seventeenth century.With contributons by Pina Palma, Iman Nick, David Fontanals, Christian Moretti, Jafar Baba, Vincenzo Lisciani Petrini and Trang Dang.

The incursions of women into areas from which they had been traditionally excluded, together with the literary representations of their attempts to negotiate, subvert and appropriate these forbidden spaces, is the underlying theme that unites this collection of essays. Here scholars from Australia, Greece, Great Britain, Spain, Switzerland and the United States reconsider the well-entrenched assumptions associated with the public/private distinction, working with the notions of public and private spheres while testing their currency and exploring their blurred edges. The essays cover and uncover a rich variety of spaces, from the slums and court-rooms of London to the American wilderness, from the Victorian drawing-room and sick-room to out of the ordinary places like Turkish baths and the trenches of the First World War. Where previous studies have tended to focus on a single aspect of women’s engagement with space, this edited book reveals a plethora of subtle and tenacious strategies found in a variety of discourses that include fiction, poetry, diaries, letters, essays and journalism. Inside Out goes beyond the early work on artistic explorations of gendered space to explore the breadth of the field and its theoretical implications.

Paul Newland’s illuminating study explores the ways in which London’s East End has been constituted in a wide variety of texts – films, novels, poetry, television shows, newspapers and journals. Newland argues that an idea or image of the East End, which developed during the late nineteenth century, continues to function in the twenty-first century as an imaginative space in which continuing anxieties continue to be worked through concerning material progress and modernity, rationality and irrationality, ethnicity and 'Otherness', class and its related systems of behaviour.The Cultural Construction of London’s East End offers detailed examinations of the ways in which the East End has been constructed in a range of texts including BBC Television’s EastEnders, Monica Ali’s Brick Lane, Walter Besant’s All Sorts and Conditions of Men, Thomas Burke’s Limehouse Nights, Peter Ackroyd’s Hawksmoor, films such as Piccadilly, Sparrows Can’t Sing, The Long Good Friday, From Hell, The Elephant Man, and Spider, and in the work of Iain Sinclair.

This study explores the ways in which the desert, as topographical space and cultural presence, shaped and reshaped concepts and images of America. Once a territory outside the geopolitical and cultural borders of the United States, the deserts of the West and Southwest have since emerged as canonical American landscapes. Drawing on the critical concepts of American studies and on questions and problems raised in recent debates on ecocriticism, The Poetics and Politics of the Desert investigates the spatial rhetoric of America as it developed in view of arid landscapes since the mid-nineteenth century. Gersdorf argues that the integration of the desert into America catered to the entire spectrum of ideological and political responses to the history and culture of the US, maintaining that the Americanization of this landscape was and continues to be staged within the idiomatic parameters and in reaction to the discursive authority of four spatial metaphors: garden, wilderness, Orient, and heterotopia.

Space in Theory: Kristeva, Foucault, Deleuze seeks to give a detailed but succinct overview of the role of spatial reflection in three of the most influential French critical thinkers of recent decades. It proposes a step-by-step analysis of the changing place of space in their theories, focussing on the common problematic all three critics address, but highlighting the significant differences between them. It aims to rectify an unaccountable absence of detailed analysis to the significance of space in their work up until now.Space in Theory argues that Kristeva, Foucault and Deleuze address the question: How are meaning and knowledge produced in contemporary society? What makes it possible to speak and think in ways we take for granted? The answer which all three thinkers provide is: space. This space takes various forms: psychic, subjective space in Kristeva, power-knowledge-space in Foucault, and the spaces of life as multiple flows of becoming in Deleuze. This book alternates between analyses of these thinkers’ theoretical texts, and brief digressions into literary texts by Barrico, de Beauvoir, Beckett, Bodrožić or Bonnefoy, via Borges, Forster, Gide, Gilbert, Glissant, Hall, to Kafka, Ondaatje, Perec, Proust, Sartre, Warner and Woolf. These detours through literature aim to render more concrete and accessible the highly complex conceptulization of contemporary spatial theory.This volume is aimed at students, postgraduates and researchers interested in the areas of French poststructuralist theory, spatial reflection, or more generally contemporary cultural theory and cultural studies

Reading Jack Kerouac’s classic On the Road through Virginia Woolf’s canonical A Room of One’s Own, the author of this book examines a genre in North American literature which, despite its popularity, has received little attention in literary and cultural criticism: women’s road narratives. The study shows how women’s literature has inscribed itself into the American discourse of the Whitmanesque “open road”, or, more generally, the “freedom of the road”. Women writers have participated in this powerful American myth, yet at the same time also have rejected that myth as fundamentally based on gendered and racial/ethnic hierarchies and power structures, and modified it in the process of writing back to it. The book analyzes stories about female runaways, outlaws, questers, adventurers, kidnappees, biker chicks, travelling saleswomen, and picaras and makes theoretical observations on the debates regarding discourses of spatiality and mobility—debates which have defined the so-called spatial turn in the humanities. The analytical concept of transdifference is introduced to theorize the dissonant plurality of social and cultural affiliations as well as the narrative tensions produced by such pluralities in order to better understand the textual worlds of women’s multiple belongings as they are present in these writings. Roads of Her Own is thus not only situated in the broader context of a constructivist cultural studies, but also, by discussing narrative mobility under the sign of gender, combines insights from social theory and philosophy, feminist cultural geography, and literary studies. Key names and concepts: Doreen Massey – Rosi Braidotti – Literary Studies – Spatial Turn – Gendered Space and Mobility – Nomadism – Road writing – Transdifference – American Culture – Popular Culture – Women’s Literature after the Second Wave – Quest – Picara.

This book testifies to the growing interest in the many spaces of utopia. It intends to ‘map out’ on utopian and science-fiction discourses some of the new and revisionist models of spatial analysis applied in Literary and Cultural Studies in recent years. The aim of the volume is to side-step the established generic binary of utopia and dystopia or science fiction and thus to open the analysis of utopian literature to new lines of inquiry. The essays collected here propose to think of utopias not so much as fictional texts about future change and transformation but as vital elements in a cultural process through which social, spatial and subjective identities are formed. Utopias can thus be read as textual systems implying a distinct spatial and temporal dimension; as ‘spatial practices’ that tend to naturalize a cultural and social construction – that of the ‘good life’, the radically improved welfare state, the Christian paradise, the counter-society, etc. – and make that representation operational by interpellating their readers in some determinate relation to their givenness as sites of political and individual improvement.This volume is of interest for all scholars and students of literature who wish to explore the ways in which utopias of the past and recent present have circulated as media of cultural exchange and homogenization, as sites of cultural and linguistic appropriation and as foci for the spatial formation of national and regional identities in the English-speaking world.

While the relationship between place and creative effort has been the focus of pronounced new interest in various disciplines, the contours and co-ordinates of the process by which one informs the other, by which landscape shapes text and vice versa, have yet to be delineated in any systematic fashion. This volume sheds light on that process, investigating the ways in which it is both reciprocal and interstitial: how does text shape our perception of landscape as much as it is shaped by it, and how do we account for the points at which text and landscape intersect? The first part of the volume introduces us to the question of process in landscape and literary studies; the second part examines the moments within the process by which landscape and text come to bear upon each other; and the final part deals with the relationship between the material experience of landscape and the formal characteristics of a given text, using this to reflect back on the processes of landscape perception and creativity. This volume spans the disciplines of geography, literary studies, and the visual arts. It also brings together scholarly and creative perspectives, interspersing academic commentary with poetic-photographic essays.

This collection of essays aims to investigate the complex issues surrounding contemporary cultural discourses on land and identity – their production, construction, and reconstruction across a range of different texts and materials. The chapters offer disciplinary and trans-disciplinary approaches opening up discussion and new routes for research in a number of interrelated areas such as Countryside vs. City, Diaspora, Landscapes of Memory and Trauma, Migrational Spaces, and Ecology. They represent a number of innovative contemporary responses to how concepts of land intersect and dialogue with notions of identity across and between regions, nations, races, and cultures. Through employing interdisciplinary methods and theories drawn from diverse sources, such as cultural studies, spatial theory, philosophy and literary theory, the chapters chart varied and complex themes of identity formation in relation to spatiality.

Travelling is the art of motion, motion results in moments of human encountering, and such moments manifest themselves in unsettling linguistic repercussions and crises of meaning. Places of arrival also function as inscriptions of such meaningful repercussions, inscriptions of the past crossing the present, of the other crossing the self. The contributions in this book explore places, rituals, texts and scriptures as religious or secular inscriptions – “topographies” – of such “arrivals.”Each arrival happens, and its very place manifests itself only as a momentous component of the process itself. Arrival is an event of conclusion as well as of urgency for subsequent explorations of new meanings to be read from the topography of the place, mirroring thus a signifying dynamic for the metamorphosis of the traveller’s self: “topodynamic” of arrival. In this vein this book investigates for the first time the dynamic of cultural formations of space, an aspect of spatiality which since the “spatial turn” in cultural discourse has mostly been neglected.

The essays in this volume present a thorough re-evaluation of the idea of place for the twenty-first century, linking across theoretical interests in space and spatialisation and in motion and mobility. ‘Placing’ becomes an active process that happens in different parts of the world, and there is work here from the countries of the United Kingdom, from Ireland, the USA, Australia and mainland Europe. Placing also happens in different contexts, in the production of visual images, in translation, in performance and in poetry that is both ‘there’ and ‘here’.The range of poets under consideration matches the breadth of the range of the contributors. International in scope, and drawn from a variety of practices and processes, their combination in a single volume leads to unusual connections and new readings of their work.

In Cormac McCarthy and the Writing of American Spaces Andrew Estes examines ideas about the land as they emerge in the later fiction of this important contemporary author. McCarthy's texts are shown to be part of larger narratives about American environments. Against the backdrop of the emerging discipline of environmental criticism, Estes investigates the way space has been constructed in U.S. American writing. Cormac McCarthy is found to be heir to diametrically opposed concepts of space: as something Americans embraced as either overwhelmingly positive and reinvigorating or as rather negative and threatening. McCarthy's texts both replicate this binary thinking about American environments and challenge readers to reconceive traditional ways of seeing space. Breaking new ground as to how literary landscapes and spaces are critically assessed this study seeks to examine the many detailed descriptions of the physical world in McCarthy on their own terms. Adding to so-called 'second wave' environmental criticism, it reaches beyond an earlier, limited understanding of the environment as 'nature' to consider both natural landscapes and built environments. Chapter one discusses the field of environmental criticism in reference to McCarthy while chapter two offers a brief narrative of conceptions of space in the U.S. Chapter three highlights trends in McCarthy criticism. Chapters four through eight provide close readings of McCarthy's later novels, from Blood Meridian to The Road.

Literature as cultural discourse has always courted mobility. From the nomadic wanderings of the heroes of Homer and Virgil through the adventures of the medieval knight-errants to the travellers of modern times, movement and mobility have been constitutive elements of story-telling. Since writers have begun to explore the experiential dimension of movement their texts have embraced the essential changeability and instability of ‘mobile worlds’. In this sense literature reflects and processes the transformative force of movement on the perception of the world and is part of the broader cultural discourses of mobility.From the 1936 film Night Mail to the rapid movements of the dime novel detective and the metaphorical coding of automobility in Futurist poetry, the essays in this volume offer new perspectives on the phenomenon of mobility at the intersection between the literary imagination and cultural experience. They explore movement as a decisive force of change in the history of modernity and show how literature in its representation of mobility simultaneously aims both to mirror and to grasp the phenomenon.