文学空间与场所研究

No abstract available

Ever since Tommy Orange’s novel There There was published in 2018, Native American urban experience has been pointed out as the novel’s crux. The characters in the novel are Native American but most of them feel estranged from the community since they do not live on reservations, whereby the general implication is that reservations have become ossified as identity markers for many Native Americans. This paper aims to analyze how the novel’s characters use urban areas to create spaces of belonging, thus debunking the myth of the “reservation Indian”. Aided by Edward Soja’s theories on Thirdspace and Robert Tally’s theory of topophrenia, the paper discusses regional powwows, non-profit organizations, American Indian cultural centers, and digital storytelling/narrativization as specific examples of the subject’s awareness of space, their engagement and inscription into space through the practices mentioned above.

This study attempted to reveal the characteristics of literary geography in Wonju folk tales by comparing the actual geographical space in folktales, which has been passed down in Wonju, Kangwon-do. The characteristics of Wonju in the folktales handed down in the Wonju area are as follows. First of all, Wonju was expressed as a gateway from Seoul to various places in Kangwon-do, or a gateway from Kangwon-do to Seoul. In addition, there was a perception that Wonju was physically and psychologically close to the center, that is, Seoul. Therefore, there was also an inherent perception that I could go to Seoul anytime I wanted. Wonju was within the sphere of influence of Joseon(朝鮮)'s Confucian ideology because it was thought to be adjacent to the center. Therefore, there was also an idea that it was a place that valued traditional values. This spatial perception in the folktale is closely related to the characteristics of the actual geographical space called Wonju. The characteristics of the actual space called Wonju are also revealed in the story. In addition, spatial images are reconstructed in a way that some of the features are highlighted or excluded. For a long time, the folktale transmission group in Wonju has recognized the attributes of the geographical space of Wonju directly or indirectly. In addition, this naturally influenced the formation of the identity of the space called Wonju in the folktale in the process of transmitting the folktale.

The concept of a sense of belonging to a place has long been the subject of attention in geographical studies. Scholars have consistently highlighted the ability of literary works to convey a spatial sense of belonging on the part of protagonists and authors, as well as to foreground landscape elements that may reveal the characters’ personalities. Within this framework of research, the paper calls attention to the specular concept of estrangement, or unbelonging: a literary geographical quality that characterizes certain novels. A comparative analysis is presented between two different cycles of detective novels set in the Italian alpine areas. Specific elements of the landscape, the social milieu, and the authors’ psychology that might convey such a sense of belonging are identified and categorized. The analysis shows how the relationship between the protagonists and the space in a novel can be based on a sense of estrangement that plays a role in signifying the characters’ psychology and personality. In conclusion, it is proposed to consider the absence of the sense of belonging to place as a literary quality and element of agency within an intra-textual analysis of literary geography.

No abstract available

ABSTRACT Railway stations have long been a fixture in urban landscapes, but they are more than just transport infrastructure. Here, I make the case for a critical geographical exploration of these seemingly mundane yet multifaceted and exciting spaces. Combining historical accounts, literary representations and perspectives from urban research, I will explore how stations act as borders, fostering a sense of mobility and connection. Yet, these same spaces can also be sites of struggle and conflict, reflecting social hierarchies and urban inequalities – for example, when studied through a postcolonial lens, or when exploring issues related to homelessness. Using different interdisciplinary perspectives on stations, this article is a resource for those interested in critical perspectives on urban spaces and transit locations. It highlights the importance of ordinary spaces ‘under our noses’, with the intention of widening participation and interest in urban and cultural geography generally.

Sarah Orne Jewett’s The Country of the Pointed Firs redefines literary realism through a distinctly female perspective, transforming the geographical space of Dunnet Landing into a vessel for women’s experiences and memories. Through the lens of an unnamed female narrator, Jewett challenges the male-dominated realist tradition by intertwining landscape with female consciousness, intimacy, and community. The novel emphasizes women’s resilience and wisdom, particularly through characters like Almira Todd, who embody a deep connection to nature and serve as emotional and cultural pillars of their rural society. Male characters are marginalized, further highlighting women’s central roles in sustaining community life. Jewett blends detailed realism with poetic romanticism, exploring themes of memory, solitude, and human connection. Her narrative strategy expands the boundaries of realism by prioritizing inner emotional landscapes and the symbiotic relationship between people and place, offering a profound critique of gender and narrative authority while affirming the enduring power of female-centered storytelling.

Geography scholarship currently includes interdisciplinary approaches and theories and reflects shifts in research methodologies. Since the spatial turn in geographical thought and the emergence of geo-web technologies, geography scholarship has leaned more toward interdisciplinarity. In recent years geographical research methods have relied on various disciplines ranging from data science to arts and design. Literary geography and film geography are two subfields of geography that employ novels and films in exploring spatiality, respectively. In addition to geographical concepts, these courses include many aspects of relations in space, including human-human relations, human-environment relations, et cetera, which were barely addressed in traditional geography courses. However, a review of the employment of geo-web technologies in literary and film geography practices reveals that these practices have mostly remained limited to isolating “geographical” passages from novels or movies. This paper explores new opportunities for designing film and literary geography-based apps using a cartographical user-centered design framework.

ABSTRACT Building on a plethora of critical feminist geographic scholarship which employs creative methods as a means to counter knowledge hierarchies and to re-think modes of geographic knowledge production, this paper proposes a more substantial engagement with creative writing in geography, reflecting on a class in which geographic research, literary texts, and storytelling were brought into conversation. The aim is to show that this triad is valuable (1) to situate storytelling in geography and see it as a way of “doing” geography in the everyday, (2) to deconstruct and reimagine various geographic themes through literary encounters, and (3) to voice personal place stories in a safe space. By using creative writing as method, students were able to explore their creative potential while also improving their writing skills and employing geographic themes such as home, place, and belonging. The short creative texts the students produced centered on issues such as migration, resistance, and environmental change, underscoring the multitude of ways to engage with and to feel for a place. The paper is thus also a (re)consideration of how as geographers or “earth-writers” we can use our creative potential in the classroom to engage differently with our students and the topics we study.

This paper investigates the spatial turn in postcolonial literary theory, foregrounding the entanglement of place, narrative, and power in literary representations of geography. The title ‘mare incognitum’—the ‘unknown sea’ marked on colonial maps—serves as a metaphor for the epistemic violence of imperial cartography, and for the counter-cartographic strategies deployed by postcolonial writers. This study interrogates how literary texts unsettle colonial spatial logics and reimagine geography as a discursive and affective terrain. The concept of landscape constitutes the central focal point to the inquiry. It is a hybrid neologism that fuses ‘landscape’ with ‘space’ to emphasize the relationship between spatial representation and narrative form. Drawing on postcolonial theory and geography, this study examines how spatial metaphors—particularly the oceanic, the archipelagic, and the periphery—disrupt hegemonic cartographies and open sites for subaltern expression and transnational solidarity. In this article, the term ‘landscape’ will be approached as a hybrid concept that will simultaneously mean landscape and space. The analysis presents a selection of postcolonial literature from the Indian subcontinent and South Asia including Salman Rushdie and Arundhati Roy, as well as the narratives of E. M. Forster and Daniel Defoe. This study investigates how spatial tropes—borders, thresholds, ruins, and archipelagos—mediate histories of displacement and resistance. The texts in question do not merely represent space; they perform spatial critique, reconfiguring geography as a palimpsest of violence, memory, and survival. Ultimately, the present study theorizes literary space as a site of epistemological intervention, where dominant narratives of territory, belonging, and modernity are deconstructed and rewritten. By treating geography as a semiotic system subject to contestation, this study also contributes to ongoing debates in literary theory about the politics of space, the aesthetics of place-making, and the decolonization of knowledge.

This article is devoted to the representation of the Middle Volga space in the works of the Russian prose writer Denis Osokin. Domestic literary scholars propose to consider artistic space from the point of view of spatial topography, which implies the opposition of abstraction to concreteness, its horizontal or vertical orientation, spatial extent and localization (expansion-compression, openness-closedness). The search for new methods for studying literary texts has given rise to the need for a comprehensive method, in which a method combining cultural-historical, mythopoetic and geopoetic analysis is quite promising. The subject of the research is the artistic space of Osokin’s “Volga region” texts. The purpose of the study is to determine the specifics of the literary geography of Osokin’s works related to the Volga region. The work uses such scientific methods of analysis as cultural-geographical, structural-semiotic methods and contextual analysis. The scientific novelty of the research is determined by the fact that among modern literary works there are no works devoted to the study of the artistic space of the works of many modern authors, in particular Denis Osokin, his works are considered insufficiently in relation to the phenomena of Kazan and other regional texts. The main conclusion of the study is the substantiation of the special properties of the artistic space of the Middle Volga in the works of D. Osokin, which has attractive properties - uniqueness, semantic richness, cognitive value. Reflection of geographical space in works of art makes it possible to represent and interpret the sociocultural processes of a place and set ontological guidelines. Osokin’s Middle Volga region is a metaspace where the national is organically combined with the foreign, it is a space of memory and the rediscovery of lost meanings.

ABSTRACT This article presents a map of a ‘poetic geography’ of short literature that appeared in public in two districts on the Asian side of Istanbul, Türkiye between 2020 and 2023. I use Michel de Certeau’s concept of ‘Walking the City’ from his The Practice of Everyday Life (1984) to link space and time to map the literary material found in Istanbul’s Üsküdar and Kadıköy districts. A poetic geography contrasts with a literal map that reduces all traces to a geometrically consistent two-dimensional surface. Mapping a poetic geography offers the advantages of annotating short verbal expressions in their lived environments without the need to collect, control, and own literary fragments. After an introduction to ‘Walking Istanbul’ through a comparison of short literary fragments found in the Rasimpaşa (Kadıköy) and Mimar Sinan (Üsküdar) neighbourhoods, I offer a definition of short literary genres that includes the material, or space and time of rhetorical figures, topoi and tropes, as embodied practices. Including the material allows for both researchers and residents to annotate examples of short literature that are distributed in diverse materials across unique urban settings.

Research in literary geography has traditionally focused on cartography overlooking the diachronic dimension of literary spaces. To analyse both the temporal and spatial dimensions of a text, we collect 600 pre-editions automatically produced from digital facsimiles, and use Large Language Models (LLMs) to extract their spatiotemporal features. To determine their accuracy and adequacy, we evaluate and compare a representative sample of LLMs using three types of prompts: meta-data, excerpts from the text, and a combination of information extracted from the text. Thanks to an ad hoc evaluation grid established for this experiment, the results are compared to a manually annotated corpus in order to evaluate the performance of various LLMs and the impact of different types of information provided. CLAUDE 3.7 SONNET appears to be the best model for this task, followed closely by the open-weight DEEPSEEK R1 (671B). Among smaller models, MISTRAL SMALL constitutes a valid cost-efficient alternative to more expensive LLMs.

This article presents a geocritical interpretation (based on the methodological approach developed by Robert Tally) of two of Judith Hermann's short stories – ‘Diesseits der Oder’ and ‘Osten’. Written almost twenty years apart, the first of these takes place amidst the Oderbruch, whilst the second comprises Hermann's only literary text about a journey to Ukraine. Drawing on interdisciplinary spatial research, I offer a close reading of both stories as they stage, in different ways, an affective experience of East European space. Moreover, I argue that through her critical investigation of the ‘East’ as an imagined and real space, Hermann emerges as a geocritic herself. Drawing on Sara Ahmed's queer phenomenology and Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht's notion of latency in post‐war culture, I contend that ‘Diesseits der Oder’ and ‘Osten’ are constituted as poetic texts that foreground disorientation through the mode of latency as a crucial phenomenological device. Once brought together into their historical and geopolitical contexts and explored through the aesthetic prism of representation of the ‘East’, Hermann's short stories are seen to advance a radical critique of perceptions of Eastern Europe in the German post‐war literary and geographic imagination.

Yoruba geography within Nigerian literature. It examines how writers construct spatial homes that are both physical and symbolic, reflecting the people’s cosmology, social organization, and ecological consciousness. Drawing on selected works by Wole Soyinka, Femi Osofisan, and T.M. Aluko, the study investigates how geography, ranging from the sacred forest to the urban landscape, shapes narrative forms, character identity, and cultural memory. The descriptive research design was used through close textual analysis and geocritical reading as works of three Nigerian of Yoruba extraction were purposively selected for this study. The study finds that Yoruba literary geography is a site of negotiation between tradition and modernity, spirituality and materialism, rootedness and displacement. The study concludes that the representation of home and environment in Yoruba literature is central to the articulation of cultural identity, serving as a dynamic space through which Yoruba writers preserve indigenous worldviews while critically engaging the challenges of social change and contemporary realities.

The article is devoted to the study of the concept of space in the worldview of the Kazakhs. Space, as a TILTANYM №4 (96) 2024 81 universal category of human thought characteristic of all ethnic groups and eras, is examined across various fields of scientific knowledge such as mathematics, physics, geography, philosophy, and linguistics. The concept of space in the article is analyzed within the consciousness of Turkic peoples, particularly in the mentality of the Kazakhs, over an extended historical period. The purpose of the article is to explore the peculiarities of how space is perceived and understood by the Kazakh people through the analysis of a literary work. The analysis is based on Ilyas Yesenberlin’s trilogy ”Nomads”, where attention is drawn to key lexical markers of Turkic nomadic culture, such as “steppe,” “land,” and “road” (“path”). The semantic analysis of these lexical markers reveals their polysemy, showcasing various aspects of how space is understood in the consciousness of the Kazakh people. Some of these markers contain sememes that express dynamism, movement, and the vastness of space. As a result of the study, it was concluded that in the Kazakh worldview, space represents a fundamental universal category closely associated with the traditional nomadic way of life and movement through space, which is undoubtedly shaped by the historical lifestyle of the Kazakhs and their habitation in the vast steppe.

 The article deals with the writing/production of space in Giedra Radvilavičiūtė’s essay “Rational Decisions”. In contemporary (literary) geography, the writing of space presupposes that space is perceived not as an empty container/stage where the action takes place, but as the space of relationships and networks of human and non-human characters which create the relational space or space as a place-event. The understanding of relational space comes from human geography, which also proposes a new ontology of the city, as outlined in Cities: Reimagining the Urban (2002) by Ash Amin and Nigel Thrift. According to these authors, what continously happens in a city is life, made up of countless human and non-human activities, communication, networks and communities. One form of community, they argue, is everyday life itself, in which unpredictable human connections and their effects are realised. The paper argues that, in “Rational Decisions”, the narration creates a new mode of Lithuanian urban literature, in which urban space is written / produced as a place-as-event of everyday life. The concept of ‘domestic disorder’ used in this essay could be one of the concepts sought by the new urban theory to bring research closer to the reality of the contemporary city.

Geography of Art is an interdisciplinary synthesis inspired by the theme of creative genius comprehending and exploring space. The project began in 1994, with the first collection of works published at the Russian Heritage Institute under Yuri Vedenin’s guidance; the first conference was held in 2009. In recent years, the conferences have been held annually under the auspices of the Institute of Scientific Information on Social Sciences of the Russian Academy of Sciences, the Russian Academy of Arts, GITR Film and Television School, the Russian State University for the Humanities. The IX International Conference Geography of Art of 2023 united culturologists and art historians, geographers and philosophers from all over Russia and abroad. Traditionally, the participants discussed issues related to artistic space of literary and pictorial works, local texts, geographical and cartographic images, and virtual spaces created by art. As always, a separate section was devoted to “mastering,” using, modeling space in screen and photography art. An innovation in the scholarly dispute of the 2023 conference was the culturological and anthropological discourse on the visual image genesis and transformation from archaic to modern times, as well as the transgression of genius loci in the online media and virtual space.

This paper aims to analyse recent tendencies in contemporary Romanian poetry from a geofeminist perspective. This specific form of feminism emerged within humanistic geography and socio-spatial theories as a response towards the “masculinist particularism” (Michèle Le Dœuff) of western geography as an academic discipline. By denouncing the postulated exhaustive nature of geographical knowledge, geofeminism’s programme is to rearticulate the traditional social space from the perspective of a cartography produced by flexible gender relations and performances. For its geopolitical position within the globalising phenomenon powered by uneven influences, the Romanian literary scene appears to be urging to consolidate the post-communist void regarding feminist theory through manifesto-texts and queer poetry. I rely my study specifically on poetic works from the frACTalia publishing house, due to their affirmed left-wing feminist consciousness. By following the factors involved in producing a space for the post-socialist Romanian queer experience, I undertake an analysis of the specific methods through which geofeminism is rendered in accordance with the need of a new poetic vocabulary and praxis.

Abstract:Ch'oe Namsŏn was a key figure in the introduction of geography into the print media culture of early twentieth-century Chosŏn. Ch'oe used geography as a tool, creating a new territorial consciousness for national cohesion, and this article explores how this greatly shaped his poetic landscape. Locating itself between the boundaries of literary studies and cultural geography, this work looks at Ch'oe's underexplored T'aebaek poetry, in which his interests in geography, history, and national identity significantly converge. Drawing on "Mount Taebaek" of Korea's past, Ch'oe fashions the mountain into a pseudo-religious icon of nationhood. A symbolic landscape, evocative of a uniquely Korean past yet rising as a global icon going into a modern world, Ch'oe's poetry creates a godlike figure for the Korean people to look to in a changing time of imperialism, nationalism, and modern progress. Through various iterations of T'aebaek—benevolent deity, bringer of modernity, omnipotent ruler of the world—one sees the mountain play a vital role in the shaping of Ch'oe's nationalist project, which would have continued influence on his writings later in life.

This article was designed to study the location and literary representation patterns of surrounding places, starting with Yongmunsan(龍門山) in the Yangpyong(楊平) area of Gyeonggi-do. Accordingly, Chapter 2 attempted to determine the location of Yangpyong while also verifying the surrounding places through literature data. This is meaningful in that it is a basic work to reveal the place of a new place through mutual negotiations between geography and literature. Next, in Chapter 3, the meaning of the space around Yangpyong Yongmunsan was sequentially confirmed. First, the beauty of the place, Yongmunsan travel, and the description of Seunggyeong were captured. Accordingly, it was found that the poems written by writers in Yongmunsan contained the beauty of the arithmetic space itself and the excellence of the surrounding landscape. This is meaningful in that it is the most superficial and most essential process in the process of recognizing the space called Yongmunsan. Second, we looked at the reproduction of the meaning of Ungyeseowon(雲溪書院), Sesimjung(洗心亭), and Hermit places. Here, a new space called Ungyeseowon Confucian Academy and Sesimjung, located around Yongmunsan, was found. In addition, it was revealed that these places are related to the Yongmun(龍門) Jowook(趙昱) and that their meaning as Hermit places has been reproduced until later generations. Third, Lee Ho-min(李好閔), Lee Gyung-eom(李景嚴)'s father and son Byeolseo(別墅), Sacheonjang(斜川庄), and Sacheonpalgyong(斜川八景) were examined. Here, by determining the space called Sacheonjang and looking at Sacheon Palgyong, the literary shape and place of the places around Yongmunsan were revealed.

The preoccupation with architecture, geography, and borders in the work of Anglo-Sudanese writers Leila Aboulela and Jamal Mahjoub is to a large extent tied to the postcolonial mindset the two authors share and the minority status of the Anglophone Arab literary tradition. This tradition aims, among other things, at rewriting space to negotiate questions of identity, power, and resistance. Drawing on recent research on the intersections between the postcolonial field and the field of space studies, this paper argues that, although Aboulela and Mahjoub both seek to expose the spatial organization of social reality, that is to say the ways in which space is both conceived and shaped to reinforce existing power differentials, they diverge on the esthetic and political strategies to challenge this power configuration. Therefore, by comparing Aboulela’s Minaret (2006) and Mahjoub’s A Line in the River: Khartoum, City of Memory (2018), it will be argued that, while Aboulela displaces the larger geographies of the nation and the city in favor of urban microstructures that become the site of dissent and empowerment for the alienated migrant subject, Mahjoub embraces the geography of the nation as holding the key both to the collective project of nation-building and the more personal task of coming to terms with the plurality of postcolonial identity.

Abstract:The introduction to this Issues in Review entitled 'Witches in Space' sets out the critical history that forms the background work on the literary geographies of early modern witchcraft. The introduction first establishes the need for such work through an illustrative case study and then attends to the foundation of scholarship in the fields of literary and cultural geography as well as witchcraft studies on which this collection of essays builds.

The Solovki Islands are a specific and mysterious territory where the history, geography and metaphysics intersect. The topography of this land, as well as natural phenomena such as « white nights », can illustrate these complicated crossings. The objective of this paper is to study the reflection of this space in the literary works by Olivier Rolin and Mariusz Wilk who situate their texts – Stalin’s Meteorologist and The Journals of a White Sea Wolf – in the Russian Far North. Adopting a geocritical perspective, I try to identify spatial structures in these works in order to understand the meanings that they carry: chaos, diversions et labyrinths.

<p>Literary geography, as a subdiscipline of cultural geography, interprets the representations of<br />landscapes and geographic phenomena in the literary discourse, and the connection between human<br />subjectivity and emotions on the one hand, and space on the other. The forest is a mythical Slavonian<br />space, depicted in Slavonian literature as an emblem representing paradisiacal plenty. The paper explores<br />the forest space portrayed by selected Slavonian authors, who depicted it in their short stories and novels<br />as an Arcadia, mirroring a variety of curious and wondrous events from the everyday life. The purpose of<br />these mini itineraries, which take us for a walk in the forest, is reflected in the need to keep the authors<br />and the readers alike from shutting themselves inside the myth of their personal smallness, and to make<br />them speak and read about themselves in a way that pushes the boundaries, which are arbitrarily drawn,<br />always from the outside, by another arbitrary myth: the one about greatness, grandeur, and great people.<br />The great story about the Slavonian forest, as the owner and guardian of boundaries, the military and state<br />ones as well as the private and intimate ones, in itself positions and constitutes the power of Slavonian<br />authors. The paper provides an incentive for and a contribution to the development of so-called green<br />literature within the cultural and creative dimensions of the European Green Deal project.</p>

No abstract available

This article examines the conception of regional literature of the Santander writer Tomás Vargas Osorio (Oiba 1908 - Bucaramanga 1941), based on a reflection on his participation in the debate between nationalism and cosmopolitanism that took place in Colombia in the early 1940s. Through an analysis of his text "Santander," published in the section "The Literary Geography of Colombia," and his role in the controversy over a short story contest, both in the Revista de las Indias, the article explores how the author defended the region as more than a subordinate periphery, as a space of cultural production that poses an active resistance to the centralization of the literary canon. For the author, regionalism is not limited to costumbrismo (costumbrism), but allows us to rethink the relationship between literature and geography, thus opening new perspectives on the place of the regional in Colombian literature.

This essay explores the song of the wheat-cutting woman in Wordsworth’s “The Solitary Reaper” through the lens of literary geography. Through the interpretation of the poem, it reveals the relationship between England and Scotland and historical reflection contained in it. Through the analysis of real space, imaginary space and dominant space, we explore how the song of the wheat-cutting girl in poetry can become the carrier of historical and cultural memory. Research shows that the geographical and cultural characteristics of Scotland are shown in delicate brushstrokes in the poem, and the complex historical relationship between England and Scotland is also conveyed secretly and deeply through the song of the wheat-cutting girl.

Place is perceived as a dynamic force and a social product in the present-day academic discourses. Place as a literary element, draws considerable attention in contemporary fiction. Gregory David Roberts’ ‘Shantaram’, published in 2003, thrives with the spirit of an urban space. The novel, influenced by the real events in author’s life, depicts the central character Lindsay’s escape from an Australian prison, his arrival in Mumbai, his imprisonment in Arthur Road Prison, and his dealings with Mumbai underworld. The novel is considered as an epic narrative that mirrors the material and human geography of Bombay/Mumbai. It offers an insight into the culturally produced nature of places. Spatiality is presented as being caught up in the unending process of cultural production. The landscape that ‘Shantaram’ presents is a product of cultural forces. The novel projects diverse places in the everyday city that are subject to the process of cultural writing. The novel underlines the political, dynamic and relative nature of the urban geography. The urban space presented in the novel is in a state of constant spatial transformation. It is constantly marked with the presence of diverse spatiality. A cultural geographic reading of Roberts’ ‘Shantaram’ with a spatial frame work underscores the fluid nature of urban landscape.

Introduction: the work is carried out in the line of regionalization of philological education, which involves the knowledge of the history, culture, literature, geography of one’s own region, in this case – the folklore of the small Motherland, the indigenous people of the North, and in this regard is relevant for the development of the regional component of educational programs in the Murmansk region. Objective: to show the contribution of teachers of the oldest university in the Arctic to the study of Sami folklore in educational institutions in Murman. Research materials: the works of methodologists – teachers of the Murmansk University in the field of literary local history and ethnopedagogy. Results and novelty of the research: the cultural space of the Kola North, which was formed from the Sami, Pomor, and all-Russian ethnic cultures, is characterized. For the first time, the role of Murmansk University teachers in developing the philological, ethnopedagogical, and methodological aspects of studying the indigenous people’s folklore in preschool and school educational institutions in Murman is analyzed. The indigenous people’s worldview, the peculiarities of their spiritual culture, history, and ethnopedagogical ideas embedded in folklore are described. The organization and process of conducting classes and lessons are presented, which allowed students to gain a general understanding of regional folklore, its significance, and specific features, and to expand their knowledge about the region’s history. The article presents some methods, forms, and techniques for studying Sámi oral and musical folk art in local history classes, provides examples of tasks and exercises on various topics, and substantiates the possibility of studying Sámi folklore in the system of basic literary education and in extracurricular activities based on the combination of local history material and the school literature course at the problem-thematic level. The article also offers texts for studying Sámi oral folk art. The author of the article reasonably concludes that the study of the folklore of the indigenous people of the Arctic Circle forms an understanding of the history and culture of the Kola North, develops skills for analyzing folklore works, and stimulates research interest.

Abstract:This essay argues that in Dante's Commedia, space is not merely a backdrop but a constitutive medium of meaning. Drawing on geocriticism and medieval spatial theory, particularly Paul Zumthor's notion of spatium, the study shows how meaning in the poem is entangled with spatial experience, and how Dante constructs a moral and epistemological geography. Through these spatial dynamics, the Commedia reveals itself as a poetics of traversal, where navigating space becomes a mode of inquiry. The essay shows how Dante acts as both navigator and cartographer, engaging medieval cartographic traditions to unfold his world, collapsing physical and temporal distances into moral scales, and ultimately refolding reality to reflect divine order. The study contributes to the broader spatial turn in literary studies, inviting further exploration of space functioning as a medium of meaning.

C.V. Raman Pillai’s Marthandavarma stands as a foundational work in Malayalam historical fiction, yet its significance extends beyond literary achievement into the realm of cultural geography. This paper examines the novel as an act of regional imagination, where narrative becomes a tool for constructing regional cartographies—not just geographical, but also historical, cultural, and ideological. By fictionalising the political transition in 18th-century Travancore, Pillai enacts a literary reclamation of space and identity, embedding a proto-nationalist sentiment within a distinctly local context. The novel resists colonial historiography by foregrounding native landscapes, vernacular ethos, and regional heroism. Through a close reading of spatial markers, political allegories, and characterisation, this study highlights how Marthandavarma configures a symbolic cartography that negotiates between history and myth, power and resistance.

The concepts of movement and stillness can be interpreted as categories that reflect the attitudes and modes of activity adopted by scholars across various disciplines, particularly in relation to their research methods. Geographical inquiry-especially fieldwork in cultural geography, which employs techniques such as inventories, photographic documentation, observation, and interviews-necessarily involves the researcher’s physical movement through space. By contrast, literary studies traditionally operate within a framework of immobility. However, this does not preclude the effective application of spatially mobile research methods to literary scholarship, particularly when examining the forms and practices of contemporary literary life in café settings.

Drawing on recent theories of geocriticism and spatial literary studies, mathematics, and cultural geography, this paper traces the courses of five rivers of the underworld in Greek mythology (the Styx and its affluent rivers, the Acheron, the Phlegethon, the Lethe, and the Cocytus) to demonstrate the blurred borderlines, functional relationships and connectivity of Shakespeare’s riverine imaginary spaces as revealed in theatrical action. Articulating notions of topology, this paper approaches space as relational and multi-layered. Early modern English theatre offers a particularly intricate intersection of spaces : the urban space of London, the space of the stage itself, evocations of various settings, more or less fictionalized and geographically and temporally removed symbolic spaces, as well as migrations of motifs from other cultures. The notion of topology conceives of theatrical space in terms of structural links. Consequently, I suggest the related idea of telemesic space, which allows different times, places and modes of representation, such as mythology, to blend on stage, which functions as a nodal point. Rivers of the underworld emerge as particularly resonant in this regard when evoked on stage. They are topological in that they both link and sever, and that they allow for a fluid transfer between early modern geographies and mythological dimensions. Shakespeare’s rivers of the underworld are located everywhere and nowhere— according to dramatic purpose — and their shifting uses reveal the topological homeomorphism of dynamic theatrical systems. Classical, medieval, and Renaissance tropes of descent to the underworld figured by infernal rivers are embodied into the actual descent to the theatre’s hell trapdoor and allegorize images of menace, terror, and dismemberment.

ABSTRACT:The article examines the relations between place, space and sound in the Swedish crossover novel The Murderer's Ape (2017 [2014]) by Jakob Wegelius. The novel is marked by its aesthetic and geographical richness and can be characterized as an adventure and detective novel where different sounds—and absence of sounds—are vital in the depiction of place. Departing from the field of literary geography, we map and analyze the novel's soundscape, i.e. the sonic environment in and the auditory experience of the text and discuss in which ways sound contributes to the novel's sense of place and how the reader is invited to construct storyworlds. Based on the sound analysis of The Murderer's Ape, we suggest five types of place-making sounds: sounds of orientation and suspense, projective sounds, plot-making places and their sounds, culture specific places and their sounds, and music sounds as, what we have termed, audiotopes. The article contributes to scholarship on Wegelius with an aesthetic oriented reading. Furthermore, by tuning in to the aural aspects of place we seek to provide a beginning framework for exploring soundscapes in narratives of children's literature.

Travel literature for young people provides an opportunity to follow the construction of identity around a double didactic knot: the here and the elsewhere. Geographical space is a key element of the novel, and places are the foundation of the narrative. As part of a humanist heritage, the writer creates a journey and an experience of the living: space and species. Xavier-Laurent Petit's work naturally suggests to readers that they belong to the world. In this literary geography, the author weaves together the perceived, experienced and represented space. He highlights landscapes and a geographical gaze that is very reminiscent of Kenneth White's geopoetic approach. This approach anchors our thinking in a triple perspective: scientific, philosophical and poetic. What is this world we live in? This question seems to be entirely contained in this call from the outside and the experience of movement. At the frontier between literature and geography, and drawing on different types of knowledge about the living world around us, travel writing for young readers has the power to question the world. Through language, it gives a space, a landscape, and even sometimes a path to read.

This article discusses John Eppel’s Bulawayo novel, The Holy Innocents, in order to see how space and place are constructed. By deploying geocriticism as a spatially oriented theory, the article shows how attention to literary geography reveals political insights into histories of race and Zimbabwean belonging. The city of Bulawayo and the literature it inspires provide a unique commentary on the cultural imagining of place. It is demonstrated that the suburb, as a locale in John Eppel’s writing, is a key unit of analysis in exploring the literary city. The political transition and cultural metamorphosis of Rhodesia into Zimbabwe are discussed through the prism of geography. Through recognising the power of space and the arguments about place Eppel makes, our understanding of Zimbabwean literary culture and its interactions with spatiality is developed.

Suzhou’s historic city center serves as a significant repository of Jiangnan cultural memory. However, ongoing urban modernization and large-scale population inflows have introduced notable challenges to heritage preservation, particularly deficiencies in spatial structure and coordination. Accordingly, this study constructs a “Historical Stratification–Spatial Cognition–Existential Narrative” framework to interpret the city’s historical urban landscape. Focusing on Suzhou—a representative canal-based historic city—this research integrates literature review with field investigation. It maps the physical points, lines, and planes of the historical urban landscape to corresponding elements, scenes, and plots within spatial narratives, thereby forming coherent and multi-perspective pathways of historical spatial narration. Moreover, by examining the coupled relationship among space, narrative, and memory, the study analyzes the spatiotemporal evolution and cultural characteristics of Suzhou’s water–land symbiosis. As a result, it identifies the intrinsic logic and mechanisms of spatial narratives within historic urban landscapes and expands the applicability of spatial narrative theory. Overall, the findings provide new insights for uncovering and revitalizing cultural heritage in Suzhou’s Old City within the Jiangnan context, while offering innovative conservation approaches and methodological strategies for reconstructing historical memory and guiding sustainable urban renewal.

“The Island of Brazil” offers a critique of nationalist historical and spatial mythologies by drawing on the agility and flexibility of creativecritical methods. Operating at the intersection of fictocriticism, memoir and travel writing, the essay is both an extension of the author’s previous writing on South America and a journey into the unknown. This entangled mixture is not [just] an aesthetic exercise; rather, the interwoven analysis, description and narration reflect the author’s concern with transnational histories of colonisation – specifically, those analogous forms and metaphorical resonances which have otherwise been separated by modern, nationalist histories and their restricted vistas of representation. “The Island of Brazil” proposes an antithesis of Australian conquest by recalling a neglected lineage of Australian poetics – here represented by Patrick White’s Voss, a novel that is emblematic of colonialist literature but, in its complexity, contradictions and expressionism, powerfully subverts many colonialist tropes. Like Voss, “The Island of Brazil” revives baroque, counter-modern strategies by constructing a series of coincidentia oppositorum (coincidence of opposites) and discordia concors (a combination of dissimilar images, or even the discovery of occult resemblances in things apparently unlike). Accordingly, vast distances and times are collapsed or overlaid.

No abstract available

The article is about literary representations of the transformation of the Mediterranean route(s). selected examples of German-language literature by Thomas Gsella, Babak Ghassim and Usama Elyas,Sabine Scholl, Bodo Kirchhoff and Lina Atfah. With reference to spatial and (non-/non-)place theories, motifs such as ships, beaches, (Mediterranean) seas, escape routes or Odysseys an attempt is made to show how the route(s) develop away from a mare Nostrum and towards a Mare Monster began to emerge.

Linda Hogan is a Chickasaw writer grown up in the Native American Renaissance, who feels much obliged to figure out an effective way of guiding the colonized native people out of ecocide and ethnocide wrought by the Euro-American colonization. As an author wholly drenched in the indigenous cosmology, Hogan bestows great concern on the issue of place in the literary creation, which is a pivotal cosmological element in the native epistemological system and thus can be taken as a means for her to decolonize her people. This paper is to investigate the issue of colonization and decolonization through the lens of place in the register of human geography by exploring the spiritual disorientation attributed to land loss represented in her novel <i>Solar Storms </i>(1995). Based on detailed textual analysis, it is unfolded that the spiritual disorientation in the Indian community has been overtly embodied in two aspects: native men’s alcoholism and their conceding to white masculinity, and child abuse conducted by women for their suffering from intergenerational trauma, which truly represents the mental or psychological crisis of indigenous peoples triggered by and attendant to the land loss. In conclusion, the decolonizing process in Hogan’s fiction necessitates reviewing the horrible outcome of the native people’s land loss history so as to enhance their recognition of the communal place, stimulate their sense of community and develop new sites and strategies of resistance.

In this commentary, I chart the future trajectories of postcolonial literary geography that would enable it to become an inquiry of literary and geographical knowledge of 21st century globalization replete with neo-imperial agendas and controls. In this context, I focus on three overlapping moments in critical thought – the spatial turn, affective turn, and environmental turn – that can revitalize postcolonial literary geography to analyze and contest contemporary crises in place-making and its reflection in literature.

The present era, marked by the onset of posthumanism, is not just an antithesis to humanism but a return to a pre-humanism era where the aspects of the non-human and human existed. As a result, themes of blurring boundaries between humans and other species, climate catastrophes and ecological crises are predominantly narrativised, propelling us to look at the entanglements of human narratives, realities of geography, environment and history in studying sites of literature through the framework of performance ecologies provided by Jeff Grygny. Sheela Tomy’s Valli is one of the most recent in creating ecological awareness. In the picturesque setting of the idyllic village of Wayanad, Valli unfolds, seamlessly weaving together the essence of the locale. The traditional art forms, oral histories, dance, music, and divine invocations play a crucial role in evoking a profound sense of place. As we immerse ourselves in these cultural expressions, it becomes evident that they serve as powerful tools for analysing narrative as a spatially symbolic act, intricately mapping the memory and schema of the village. Inextricably linked to the earth, the novel foregrounds performance ecologies as a holistic interconnection of human and non-human spacetimes, thereby transforming into an intelligent discourse on spatial politics and environmental justice- a testimony to Pramod K Nayar’s description of Ecoprecarity. The paper argues that the competitive entanglement of performance ecology and spatial memory through the narrative at a literary representation level evokes a sense of ecoprecarity, which is crucial in recognition of either altering or expanding our notion of systems of sustainability.

This article presents the conceptual framing and course design of a literary and cultural studies seminar that brings arts- and place-based methodologies into dialogue with elemental ecocriticism, feminist materialisms, speculative geology, geopoetics, and inhuman geography. Introducing a process-oriented assignment titled ‘The Carrier Bag of Geostories’, we reflect on the course as an occasion for transformative learning and advocate pedagogical strategies of generative estrangement and the cultivation of familiarity with the inhuman to foster eco-systemic literacy and expand students’ capacities for environmental affect and agency.

Following the recent spatial turn in literary criticism and the shift of focus on place, the present paper examines the special significance of place in Henry James’s novel The Ambassadors (1903) and explores the relationship between geography and psychology through the main character, Lambert Strether. Analysing the latter’s outer and inner observations draws on a close reading of the novel and the instrumentation of such theories as psychogeography and psychoanalytical criticism. Strether’s trip is an introspective voyage as much as an exploratory expedition, allowing insight into his subconsciousness through the tropes of the places he traverses. His mental visions of spaces in the novel can be surmised in terms of a psychogeography of his movements, a sort of landscape of the mind which is a reflection of the Freudian perception of the human psyche.

Speculative thinking has made its mark in several disciplines and literary genres, including continental philosophy, predictive analytics, and science (or speculative) fiction. What might speculation look like through a geographical lens? And how would such thinking in a distinctly geographical register build on and possibly place into a wider context work on utopias, alternative communities, game worldscapes, and speculative futures? This conversation brings together four geographers who have worked across these topics to help examine the relations between speculative geographies.

Geography is a practice that examines spatial relationships and the interaction between humans and their environments. Its importance lies in providing critical perspectives for understanding contemporary global issues. Geography has evolved from ancient civilizations to a formal academic discipline in the 19th century, influenced by figures like Alexander von Humboldt and Carl Ritter. The 20th century introduced quantitative and critical geography, reshaping geographical inquiry. Literature reflects geographical practices by using settings to enhance narratives. Works like John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath and J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter series illustrate how geography informs character and plot. Geographical imaginaries shape our understanding of places through cultural narratives. Case studies, such as Steinbeck's and Rowling's works, highlight how these imaginaries influence identity and experience. Place significantly impacts identity formation. Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake demonstrates the complexities of identity-related to cultural heritage and geography. Literature often explores the relationship between humans and nature. Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring serves as a critique of environmental neglect, emphasizing the need for a sustainable relationship with the natural world. Urban literature captures the complexities of city life. F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby critiques the American Dream through its urban settings, illustrating social disparities. Culture shapes geographical understanding. Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart explores the impact of colonialism on indigenous cultures and landscapes. Geographical research employs various methodologies that can inform literary analysis, revealing how geographical elements shape narratives. Globalisation reconfigures spatial relationships, as seen in Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist, which explores the tensions between global and local identities.

ABSTRACT Geology allows us to visualise events that are so distant in time and alien in materiality, thereby challenging the concept of place as a fixed entity. This article introduces Literary Geology as a critical approach for reading a place and its temporalities in literature through an analysis of Fabio Pusterla’s poetry. Literary Geology draws on Material Ecocriticism, Geocriticism, Literary Geography and Doreen Massey’s theory of place as event. By examining geological matter and perspectives, Literary Geology explores representations of place within the temporalities of the Anthropocene. In doing so, this approach addresses the socio-political contexts that shape places, particularly in the midst of current geographical transformations. The article first presents the theoretical foundations of this approach and then analyses the ‘spaces of collapse’ that Pusterla creates to represent the border between Italy and Switzerland. Through this analysis, the article questions the role of borders in place-making and identity demarcation.

Ge Liang's novel Scarlet Finch employs a meticulous narrative style to depict Nanjing's cultural heritage and humanistic spirit, as well as the city's unique character—one that embraces classical traditions while embracing moderni-ty—forged by its distinctive natural geography and profound historical legacy. Taking Ge Liang's novel Scarlet Finch as a case study, this paper employs literary geography to analyze the depictions of natural and human geographical envi-ronments within the work. It interprets two representative geographical sym-bols—the Qinhuai River and the Scarlet Finch—to explore the multifaceted connotations of the geographical spaces and imagery presented in Scarlet Finch: the historical orientation of urban memory, the folk orientation of the “radish spirit,” and the urban orientation blending old and new.

This study offers an interpretive, semantic, and educational analysis of the story of Moses and al-Khidr in Surah al-Kahf (verses 60–82). It focuses on the symbolic and geographical dimensions of place and its role in shaping the educational and epistemological experience of Prophet Moses (peace be upon him). The research adopts an integrative approach that combines classical Qur’anic exegesis, Islamic mysticism, and theories of symbolic space in religious and philosophical thought. The story is analyzed as a sequence of transitional phases in a geographical space that goes beyond physical description, carrying spiritual and pedagogical implications. These stages include the symbolic starting point at the "junction of the two seas," the loss of the fish, the meeting with al-Khidr, and the three events (the scuttling of the ship, the killing of the boy, and the building of the wall). The research shows how Qur’anic geography transforms into a multi-layered semantic space, where each place represents a stage in Moses’ inner transformation, from acquired knowledge to divinely inspired knowledge, and from the logic of appearance to the insight of the unseen. The study reveals that the setting in this story is not merely a background for events, but rather an active educational element that contributes to shaping major concepts such as knowledge, submission, spiritual excellence (ihsan), and epistemic humility. The research concludes that Qur’anic pedagogy is deeply intertwined with its symbolic and emotional contexts and relies on them to form the ideal human being.

The paper examines the anthology of essays “Martial Law” through the lens of cultural geography shaped during the Russian-Ukrainian war. It emphasizes the cultural and social ties between humans and the landscape. In cultural geography, the landscape functions as a cultural text, full of its own semiotics. The analysis compares the concepts of ‘place of memory’ as a real geographical space where people live, and ‘memory space’ as an imagined geographical site shaped by thought. The attention is focused on the phenomenon of war, which transforms interactions between humans and places, shifting them from the material realm to the symbolic one. Military actions destroy real geography, deprive a person of their own space, and turn it into a metaphor in the individual domain of memory. This shift results in a crisis of language, when traditional verbal means prove inadequate to describe the new military experience. The memory of a place exists in time, increases over time, and grows with the cultural memory of those connected to actual place. At the same time, the space of human memory is intertwined with language. A person gets acquainted with a space through the verbalization of specific places, integrating them into personal memory and experience. The relation of memory space and a place of memory involves the dichotomy of individual and collective memory, which marks the intersection of real and cultural geography. By summarizing individual unique experiences, we can observe how the Ukrainian mental map is shaped on both synchronic and diachronic levels. The integration of these levels into literary stories enables the existence of a single common space of collective memory. This memory ensures connection between generations in time and between Ukrainians in space. It creates the reality of a national identity that rises in defiance of the genocidal practices witnessed during the Russian-Ukrainian war.

In this case study we discuss different approaches to the study of literature in digital humanities and try to join two methodologies, namely distant reading and spatial analysis. We first describe shortly the two projects involved, the Atlas of Literary Landscapes of Mainland Portugal and Literateca, highlighting and quantifying the different ways to deal with place in literature in Portuguese. Then we describe some different paths to compare and harmonize the two approaches, focusing on annotation, extraction and geocoding of place names.

Toponymic names are closely related to society, human life, the language and history of the people, its centuries-old culture, religion, and political life. Therefore, names of place are one of the most significant issues of any nation. The process of giving names to land, water, and locality is one of the main processes of the people's creativity, which has its own national and linguistic features and is continuously ongoing. Kazakh geographical names are very expressive and colorful. Toponyms are constantly replenished and renewed, they served the needs of the past society, they serve the modern society in a comprehensive way, and at the same time, they will serve future generations as a continuation of history. One of the ways to comprehend and study national history is historical toponyms. Revealing the mystery of the origin of the names of places and water opens up a wide path not only to the knowledge of the nation’s history, but also to know the the deep layers of the history of the region. The local names are based on historical events experienced by the people, and preserved legends and stories about historical figures of each period, reflecting its source character. Historical toponyms, toponymic legends are considered especially one of the artistic components of historical works. The artist firmly preserves the historical chronotope when writing an event of a known historical period in his work. He creatively uses the history of the names of place-waters, a landscape image in the people's memory. Examples of this are characteristic of the works of many famous writers. The article studies the names of the waters and lower reaches of the Syr Darya and the coast of the Aral Sea in the cycle of historical novels by Z. Shukurov "Syr boyi", their origin, toponymic legends in the mouths of the country and their relationship to historical reality.

ABSTRACT This article serves to fill a theoretical lacuna in African language literary scholarship. To date there have been very few literary geographic analyses related to South African literature and there are none that deal with African language literature. The purpose and objective of this article is to apply theoretical aspects of literary geography to an isiXhosa novel, Ingqumbo Yeminyanya. This novel, written by AC Jordan is perhaps the best known and most widely read and translated novel written in isiXhosa. The authors of this article aim to contribute to postcolonial studies by reading the novel of A.C. Jordan spatially, using Hones’s conceptual framework of the novel as a spatial event, considering the complex relationship between the author, the text, and the readers. The background of the author and the historical circumstances that surround the writing of the novel are also explored to see how Jordan’s own spaces are reflected in the novel through characterization and other techniques. The core focus of the article lies in the descriptions and relationship to real or imaginary or in-between spaces and places in relation to the research question, namely how space and places are depicted in Ingqumbo Yeminyanya, as part of the spatial event.

The article is devoted to the problem of the formation of geo-cultural texts within the framework of literary geography. An important part of literary and geographical studies is the study of geographical images presented in literary works. The concept of a geo-cultural text makes it possible to typologize literary and geographical images in relation to different geo-cultures. Local geo-cultures with a developed literary tradition usually have a number of representative geo-cultural texts that characterize the landscape and figurative features of the development of a given territory. The evolution of the Black Sea text is considered using the concepts of geo-culture and geo-cultural text. Images of the South, exoticism, and antiquity are explored as key images determining the development of the Black Sea text. Special attention is paid to the formation of interrelations between the images of the Crimea and antiquity. The marine “exoticism,” combined with the “atmosphere” of antiquity, the marginal antiquity of European culture, turned out to be the strongest emotional stimulus for the formation of both southern and Black Sea images in Russian literature. In the geo-cultural context, the “crystallization” of the Black Sea text of Russian literature takes place by the end of the 19th–beginning of the 20th century (I. Bunin, A. Kuprin). This is due to the rich landscape descriptions, which make it possible to talk about the “Black Sea aura” of these texts and the emergence of a kind of “Black Sea ontologies.” Further, the substantial core of the geo-cultural Black Sea text in the 20th century is determined by the works of M. Voloshin, O. Mandelstam, I. Babel, A. Green, K. Paustovsky, V. Kataev. Through the “crystallization” of the Crimean and Black Sea texts and the modern re-creation of its own image of “Black Sea antiquity” throughout the 20th century, Russian culture created its geo-cultural “antiquity” within the framework of the European geo-cultural space. Thanks to the work of I. Brodsky (“Roman” and “imperial” loci), the Crimean and Black Sea texts expand their semantic field, turning out to be a “node” of metaphorical assimilation, uniting the Mediterranean geo-cultural area and geo-cultural zones of influence of Russian literature.

Poetry is one of the important carriers of historical and cultural heritance. Nanjing, distinguished as one of China's earliest national historical and cultural cities, holds the esteemed titles of the “Capital of Six Dynasties” and the “Capital of Ten Dynasties”, with a long history and profound cultural deposits. There are a large number of poems with Nanjing as the object of description, holding a wealth of cultural and geographical insights within Nanjing's poetic heritage. Exploring the abundant cultural and geographic knowledge is of great significance to the study on the city’s historical culture and literary geography. Based on the data sources of books such as The Complete Poetry Collection of Tang Dynasty, The Complete Ci-Poetry of Song Dynasty, A Dictionary of Poetry Appreciation in Yuan, Ming and Qing Dynasties, and Nanjing poetry map, in this paper, we selected the poems involving Nanjing written from Tang Dynasty to Qing Dynasty, sorted out literature and geographic information such as the poets’ life experience, poetry genre, poetry theme, the place described, literary landscape and landscape elements. On this basis, we produced a dataset of literary geography for Nanjing-related poetry. The dataset can serve as a valuable resource for researching historical culture and literary geography.

This research aims to analyze the dynamics of space in Moniza Alvi’s seven poems from her collection The Country at my Shoulder (1993). It explores how spatial anxiety and dislocated geographical and cultural concerns become prominent in her poems through different spaces. This research mainly highlights the collision of two diverse cultures and value systems in Alvi’s poems to bring forth her transcultural quests, which display the influence of geographical perplexity on postmodern literature. The research employs the theoretical framework of spatiality primarily discussed by Gaston Bachelard, Henri Lefebvre and Benjamin N. Vis. First, architectural spaces, such as rooms and buildings, are discussed in the context of her native culture, as architectural trends of a nation are representative of its culture. Second, social and filial spaces are traced in the form of city space and social ties to unearth their influence on the poet’s existence. Third, diasporic spaces are analyzed through the contrast of oriental and occidental psyches to determine the poet’s vacillation between dual cultures. Fourth, geological and body spaces are interpreted through the metaphor of a displaced geography to highlight the angst of dislocation. These spaces are specifically explored in the light of the philosophies of different critics of space. This exploration shows that Alvi’s poetry proves to be a multi-spatial platform that is reflective of the general restlessness of the 21st century due to postmodern spatial crisis and the dilemma of migration.

An examination of real Australian cities can be approached through the spatial study of geocriticism; however, this process relies on curated source selection that can yield particular ideas about community and a sense of place. Furthermore, engaging with a textual analysis of the geocritical review can produce a homogenisation of social representations that may reinforce omissions and exclusions of groups (Harris 2018). To demonstrate the problems, but also the opportunities of using geocriticism to examine how a sense of place emerges through Australian literature, this discussion examines a case study of Walyalup/Fremantle, Western Australia. This case study explores the first stage of source selection, its limitations and issues, as well as the space for researchers and writers to reflect on omissions and absences in published literature, and the secondary considerations of the absent voices through a cursory textual analysis of the selected sources. Each of the texts selected is a representation of a microcosm of society in Walyalup/Fremantle within a wider Australian context, and as such all aspects should be considered as contributing towards the weave of the city’s narrative. This discussion aims to identify both the value of a geocritical review of literature and bring to the researcher and writer an awareness of problems that may emerge from this approach. When considering the use of geocriticism as a tool for creative practice, a deliberation of such inclusions and omissions must be reviewed to ensure that a silencing of voices does not continue in a writer’s own work. Exclusions of who belongs in a place and to a place are problematic (Potter & Magner 2018), and if perpetuated in creative writing, can generate iterations of silences.

This study addresses the need for an interactive digital platform to support the preservation of linguistic and literary data in Jambi Province. Existing platforms developed by Balai Bahasa Provinsi Jambi provide textual information only and lack spatial visualization, limiting users’ ability to explore linguistic distributions. Geographic Information Systems (GIS) are suitable for linguistic documentation because dialect boundaries and speech communities are strongly related to geographic regions. This study aims to design and develop a front-end GIS interface for mapping linguistic and literary data using the Incremental Model and to evaluate its functional performance through Black-Box Testing. The system was built using HTML, CSS, JavaScript, the Laravel Blade templating engine, and the Leaflet library for interactive map visualization. The Incremental Model supported iterative development, allowing core features map visualization, search and filter functions, and detailed information pages to be refined based on continuous feedback. Data from Balai Bahasa Provinsi Jambi, including language names, literary descriptions, documentation files, and geographic coordinates, were used as input. The results show that the system meets all functional requirements, achieving a 100% success rate across 11 Black-Box test scenarios, and providing real-time response capabilities for search and filter functions. These technical outcomes demonstrate that incremental front-end development is effective for building modular and interactive GIS interfaces. This study contributes to digital cultural preservation efforts and provides a foundation for future GIS-based linguistic mapping initiatives, while further research is needed to enhance backend integration, expand datasets, and evaluate system performance at scale.

The cultural landscape is understood as the area of human habitation and the result of human activities in a particular space. In literature, it manifests itself as an emotionally charged local landscape, as a sensually and intertextually explored travel destination or as a former historical region (as a lost cultural landscape). The article examines literary topographies and factors that influence the perception and literary representation of the cultural landscape. The existential dimension of the landscape experience is linked with spatial categories, motifs of travelling and movement in different configurations. Finally, on the basis of the contributions collected in the volume, representations of cultural landscapes in travel literature are discussed.

In recent years, academic disciplines across the social sciences and humanities have witnessed a surge of interest around questions of materiality. One strand of this work has been ambitious in its attempts to theorise ‘things-in-themselves’, or the nature and potential of matter, constituting what has come to be called a ‘new materialism’. Geographers have been particularly influential in these debates, especially through research conducted in the style of non-representational theory. In this work, much emphasis is placed on bodies, objects and enactment in specific spaces and places. Although representation has been theorised within this literature as eventful and performative, there remains relatively little research into the textual and narrative practices by which words make worlds. My interest in this article, therefore, is to draw out how language has been theorised within non-representational theory and in new materialist thought more broadly, with the aim of developing a more nuanced understanding of the work that textual representations do in constituting the material realm. Specifically, I explore how text may be seen as eventful, performative and generative. The second half of the article opens these ideas further through an analysis of The Hare with Amber Eyes, a memoir that in its explicit concern with physical things demonstrates how particular vocabularies, narratives and indeed silences can work to generate the world of the tangible. Moreover, the book explores the nature and possibilities of stories as things themselves, in ways that may open fresh questions for new materialist theory.

In this paper, I attempted to explore the historical and geographical specificity of the space represented in Kim Si-seup’s novel Playing Jeopo at Manboksa Temple. The spatial setting of this novel is Namwon-si, Jeollabuk-do. Kim Si-seup actually traveled to Honam in 1462 when he was 28 years old and reflected his experience of exploring the Namwon area, including Manboksa Temple, in the creation of the novel space. Therefore, the place names mentioned in this novel serve as an important clue to the historical and geographical approach as actual places in Namwon town. The work of specifically defining the novel’s space in this way is expected to help understand the meaning of the novel’s narrative and the author’s creative consciousness. Places worth mentioning in connection with the narrative of this novel include Manboksa Temple, Jiri Mountain, Gaeryeong-dong, and Boryeonsa Temple. Manboksa Temple maintains its sense of place through Manboksa Temple Site in Wangjeong-dong, Namwon-si, Jeollabuk-do. What is noteworthy about Manboksa Temple’s location is that it is located near a densely populated area of private houses near Namwon Eupseong Fortress and has existed as a temple for a long time, granting the wishes of the people of the town. And Jiri Mountain is the last place where the novel’s male protagonist, Yangsaeng, was seen, and is closely connected to the ending of the novel. Yangsaeng goes missing after saying he was going to Mt. Jiri to dig up medicinal herbs. From this ending, we can read his desire to protect his one and only love. Meanwhile, the fact that the ridge of Jiri Mountain can be seen in the distance from the grounds of Manboksa Temple implies that the starting point of this novel also encompasses the space that hints at its lonely ending. Boryeonsa Temple is a temple located at the foot of Boryeon Mountain, and its location is presumed to be Bangchon-ri, Geumji-myeon, Namwon-si, Jeollabuk-do. This place contains the climactic moment of the novel when Yangsaeng, who was immersed in love with the heroine despite her many suspicious circumstances, was ultimately forced to accept that the heroine did not belong to the human world. Gaeryeong-dong is a space where the anonymous heroine mainly belongs, and Yangsaeng came to fully trust and love the woman during the three days he spent there. This is also the temporary burial place of the female protagonist who was sacrificed during the Japanese invasion of Namwon in 1379 or 1380. I was the first to raise the inference that this Gaeryeong-dong is the valley below Gaeryeongamji in Deokdong-ri, Sannae-myeon, Namwon-si, Jeollabuk-do. Gaeryeongam was a temple near Jeongnyeongchi on Jiri Mountain, located on the road from Namwon, Jeolla Province, to Hamyang, Gyeongsang Province. The temple, built during the Goryeo Dynasty, no longer exists, leaving behind only a few traces. Kim Si-seup passed through this place in 1462 on his way from Namwon to Gyeongju via Hamyang. What is noteworthy about the location of Gaeryeong-dong is that it is located within the area of Jiri Mountain. This helps us understand the movements of the ending, where Yangsaeng enters Jiri Mountain and goes missing. For Yangsaeng, Gaeryeong-dong was a place engraved in his heart as it was the place where he spent the longest time with the heroine. When Yangsaeng, who valued one love more than Buddhist liberation, went to Gaeryeong-dong to check for traces of the woman, he had already entered Jiri Mountain. When he disappeared into Jiri Mountain, he had only gone a little deeper from where he originally was. Gaeryeong-dong, located at the starting point of Jiri Mountain, becomes an important coordinate in the movement of Yangsaeng who disappeared without having lost his one and only love.

The article explores the issues of regional identity formation in Dmitry Bavlinsky’s novels Potato Eaters (2001) and Red Dot (2020). The main objective of the work is to identify the mechanisms for creating a unique image of the city in literary works dedicated to Chelyabinsk, presented under the fictional name Cherdachinsk. The article consists of several sections: the first describes methods of identity formation through spatial and cultural elements, and the second analyzes the structure of the novels and their compositional features. The authors also examine the use of artistic strategies such as ekphrasis and mythopoetics in shaping the city’s image. In conclusion, the article discusses the impact of local texts on regional identity formation and outlines prospects for further research in this area.

The article is devoted to the description of geographical and climatic conditions, features of urban and rural infrastructure of the Penza Region in the memoirs of prisoners of war of the Great Army in the context of the formation of regional identity. The main sources when considering the problem were the memoirs of Yu. von Soden, H.-L. Yelin, F. von Furtenbach, F. Baggi, F. Pisani, K.H.L. Schenck von Winterstedt, K.A.V. von Wedel, A. von Leisser, S.B. Peszke, Bűttner, L. Fleck. Currently, mutual representations of European peoples in the era of the Napoleonic Wars are increasingly the subject of close historiographical interest. The formation of the image of the other in various social, cultural and ethnic communities makes it possible to understand the formation of ones own identity. One of the factors in the formation of regional identity is the identification of oneself with a certain territory. In this regard, the description by the prisoners of war of Napoleons army of the landscape and climatic features of the region, its urban infrastructure is very important, as it makes it possible to imagine the emergence and development of cultural, national, religious, socio-economic and political features of the organization of society.

The article problematizes the discourse on Central Europe following a trajectory from the twentieth-century geopolitics and region-building projects founded on identity politics to the contemporary geopoetics and literary self-identifications shaped in relation to place and time. Emphasis is put on the second geopoetic, literary pole which is nourished by negative categories and is composed of particular articulations of being a Central European shaped in time of historical discontinuities and crises. Methodologically the paper is framed by the interdisciplinary sensory studies. The article addresses several contemporary writers’ self-identifications (Andrzej Stasiuk, Robert Makłowicz, Drago Jančar) founded on “autobiographical sites” which give insight into shared articulations of certain elements of Central European myth (problematic identity, spatial in-betweenness and feeling of transience, idealized Habsburg Monarchy).  Furthermore, the instances of reconfiguration of this myth are presented by paying attention to the role of somatic experience shaping sensuous topographies of Central Europe which reconfigure the region's imagined spatial coordinates by replacing the horizontal dichotomy of the desired western culture and rejected eastern politics with the vertical paradigm of southern and northern vectors. Has Central Europe present in contemporary twenty-first century literary representations replaced the twentieth-century Cold-War West-East geopolitical in-betweenness with the geopoetic meridian points of reference?

This article examines how landscape shapes refugees’ identities in Krishna Dharabasi’s Saranarthi. It explores the impact of landscapes in Burma, Northeast India, Bhutan, and Nepal on individuals who, after residing for centuries in Burma, leave their host country in search of a place to belong. After deserting Burma, the refugees hope to find a home in their ancestors’ land. Some, upon reaching this land, smell the soil, seeking their ancestors’ footsteps and the comfort of a homeland. Others explore living opportunities in Indian locations such as Assam, Meghalaya, Manipur, Mizoram, Sikkim, and Darjeeling, or head to Bhutan, anticipating opportunities in a new location. Ironically, these refugees, marginalized by discriminatory state laws, are compelled to abandon their new locations and are eventually transported to their ancestors’ land. Drawing on scholars like Arjun Appadurai and Paul Jay, who discuss the nexus between transnational space and identity, this study scrutinizes how a literary work creates a connection between landscape and identity, particularly for transnational subjects like the refugees in Saranarthi. Based on the characters’ mobility across different locations, this paper concludes that land and landscapes are inseparable from human identity, and is more intense and engaging in refugees’ lives.

Abstract The American West is not just a geographical terrain but a mythical construct that occupies a powerful place in the popular imagination thanks to myriad literary and artistic works that have presented the region through specific archetypes emphasizing its vast ruggedness, white masculinity, and unique Americanness. In recent decades, revisionist scholarly and artistic works, however, have attempted to offer more nuanced perspectives on the region challenging its assumed homogenous history and fixed and stable identity. In particular, women filmmakers have recast the region through multifaceted representations underlining its complexity, diversity, and transnational dimensions. This article analyzes Vera Brunner-Sung’s film Bella Vista (2014) to examine how the film intervenes in previously constructed representations of the American West through its emphasis on transience, displacement, and belonging. Set and made in Montana, the film employs a “slow cinema” aesthetic to offer deep insights into the local and global dynamics of the place as well as the formation of identity and (un)belonging within a Western landscape. The film, as the article argues, provides a reconsideration of the West through diverse localities that are in constant relation with the outside and in turn have generated diverse individual experiences regarding the place.

One of the cultural and geographical problems of literary landscape research is the definition of the very concept of landscape, which some authors reduce to a description of nature, “not noticing” the importance of its cultural component. Another theoretical problem stems from the first and is related to the understanding of the national landscape as a typically generalized image of native nature. At the same time, significant natural and cultural contrasts of a large country are not taken into account: it is not clear how to “generalize” forest and steppe, urban and rural, sea and river landscapes. One of the ways to solve the problem of the national landscape in literature is for the researcher to choose one of the regional landscapes of the geniuses of the place (Pushkin’s Mikhailovsky, Lermontov’s Tarkhans, Turgenevsky’s Spassky- Lutovinov or Meshchera Paustovsky) as a national landscape; but in this case, an important role is played not so much by the nature of the landscape as by the individual literary preferences of the researcher. Another objectified solution to the problem justifies the choice of a birch grove as a Russian national landscape.

The article examines the problem of national identity formation in the context of geopoetics of the “Siberian text” in Russian literature, using L.A. Yuzefovich’s novel “Winter Road” as a case study. The author explores the peculiarities of representing Siberian space as a crucial component of national consciousness and cultural code. Special attention is given to the analysis of spatial metaphors, topographical images, and their symbolic meaning in the novel. The paper reveals the mechanisms of interaction between the natural landscape and a literary text, examining the role of the geographical factor in the formation of personal and collective identity of the characters. The methodological framework of the research is based on the principles of geopoetic analysis, the theory of literary space, and the concept of national identity. The article substantiates the thesis that the “Siberian text” in L.A. Yuzefovich’s novel appears as a specific form of comprehending national identity through the prism of a particular spatial worldview. The writer shows that the national identity of the characters is closely linked to their attitude to this space and its cultural peculiarities, and a unique natural locus can not only form an independent moral paradigm of local residents, but also act as optics that help everyone who finds themselves in Siberia to experience and adjust their unique worldview. This is realized through the author’s documentary approach, through the historical conflict that he took as a basis, and through the geographical realities of the place setting. The scientific novelty of the work lies in identifying specific features of the Siberian discourse as an element of the national identity and its representation in modern Russian prose.

Defining Ukrainian identity as a European one has become the stake of the political and military struggle between Russia and Ukraine. Disregarding the Ukrainian nation in general and its European vector produced a rift between related peoples. Manipulation of identity, control over the past, the way of managing memory have become current themes of Ukrainian writers. Our paper is an analysis of an emerging geoliterary area of great interest that demonstrates the force of national cohesion to change once established regional borders, to instrumentalize and give a new meaning to memory, to take history out of parentheses, to draw projections and present solutions for the future.

The paper presented here is an integral part of the research that we have been developing since 2018, at the University of Lisbon, in the research group ZOE – Urban and Regional Change and Policies. The project compares flora described in novels from the past centuries with landscapes and plant uses from the same environments, both countries and cities. The current study is a comparative analysis of the landscapes described in “Capitães da Areia (1937)”, by the Brazilian writer Jorge Amado and the results of a 2023 University of Lisbon scientific mission to Salvador, when a survey of flora consumption was conducted among residents. It included an exploration of Amado and Gattai’ food and spice garden, in the neighbourhood of Rio Vermelho, capital city of Bahia state, now a museum open to visitors. Amado’s literary descriptions include twenty-four plant species, seventeen of them having been reported in the 2023 survey conducted in Salvador. Based on a theoretical-conceptual analysis about the landscape geography-literature relationship, we will understand how Amado's literary work, produced in the 1930s, is represented in the contemporary streets of Salvador, concluding that the aforementioned book can be seen as an object of investigation in Geography. Keywords: Brazil, Salvador, Flora, Literature, Cities.

This paper proposes Creative Folklore Journalism, a new sub-genre of literary journalism utilising the discipline’s immersion to depict places intertwined with local folklore, creating a captivating narrative revealing the ‘invisible landscape’ through an enriched sense of place. This sub-genre recognises the role folklore has in sustaining meaningfulness in places and advocates for presenting place and folklore together by preserving the ‘geographical root’. This research pioneers Creative Folklore Journalism and explores how it utilises the fundamental devices of literary journalism enhanced with contemporary scholarship and an innovative folklore focus to capture enriched sense of place. An Australian case study examines its first instance of use in documenting the regional non-Indigenous folklore of a rural South Australian town through an immersive narrative that reveals the ‘invisible landscape’ otherwise unknown by outsiders. In conjunction with literary journalism, the research also adopts archival research, literary cartography, and narrative inquiry to thicken the narrative. In doing so, this paper proposes a replicable model using Creative Folklore Journalism that deepens sense of place in immersive storytelling.

This paper explores the representation of regional identity and the American landscape in 20th- and 21st-century literature, focusing on the geographical diversity of the United States. Through the works of authors such as William Faulkner, John Steinbeck, Toni Morrison, and Leslie Marmon Silko, it examines how specific regions—such as the South, the West, the North, the Midwest, and Native American territories—serve as symbolic and literal settings for themes of cultural identity, racial dynamics, social conflict, and environmental change. The landscape is not merely a backdrop but a dynamic force that shapes characters' experiences, identities, and struggles. By analyzing both novels and poetry, this paper demonstrates how literature reflects the complex interplay between geography and personal narrative, revealing how different landscapes function as metaphors for broader societal issues in American history and contemporary life.

This research aims to introduce the concept of geopolitical theory and its relationship to identity patterns in Arabic literary texts. It highlights the scholars' and critics' openness to the humanities and applied sciences that intersect with modern critical theories. Any shift in political perspectives that leads to changes in the landscape of a nation necessitates corresponding transformations in literary texts and subsequently in identity patterns. This study holds significant importance both in geographical and literary/critical studies, seeking to explore interdisciplinary aspects within the humanities and to express the lived Arab reality. Furthermore, it emphasizes the relevance of keeping up with the advancements in critical studies due to their influence and interaction with foreign counterparts. The research delves into the problem of identifying a connection between the dimensions of geopolitical theory from both geographical and critical perspectives. To address this, poetic models are chosen that illustrate the relationship between geopolitical theory, identity patterns, and poetic texts. The study aims to answer some research hypotheses and address its problematic aspects through the results obtained, notably the inevitability of the existence of a relationship between geopolitical theory, identity patterns, and poetic texts. The research comprises two main axes. The first axis is theoretical and explores the concept of geopolitical theory, its dimensions, and its relationship to identity patterns. It also considers the main elements that contributed to shaping geopolitical theory in literary texts, including political, cultural, social, and civilizational factors, among others. The second axis is applied and focuses on the geopolitical aspects of poetic structures, particularly in functional and prose poetry

Using select indigenous novels translated from the Malayalam language, this paper will study how fictional spaces created by writers of Indian regional languages become a counter-narrative for colonial history and decolonise narrative and physical spaces. The paper will examine how postcolonial texts become ethnographic and social commentaries on colonial binaries and become resistance narratives to the hegemonic powers. Questions like how regional writers decolonise occidental maps, how the authors write alternative histories, how different versions of postcolonial communities are portrayed, how a postcolonial nation-state is built through literature, how communities that were left out in colonial discourses are brought back to the folds; how the history of a place influences power and identity of people; how Malayali writers locate an imagined space within actual geographic space through cartography; what determines the boundaries of these spaces- economically, culturally, historically, and politically, etc. will be addressed.

: [Objective] The integrated knowledge system of “environment – architecture – behaviour – perception” embedded in classical Chinese gardens has not been systematically recognized in the contemporary research system dominated by the study of material entities and combined with the contemporary design theory system, resulting in the disconnection between ontology research and design research of classical gardens, and the inefficiency of the transformation and application of research results. Aiming at the problem of excavating and characterizing multi-dimensional elements in classical gardens, this research reviews imperial poems in the Fuhai area of Yuanmingyuan Garden, summarizes the coupling relationship of key elements, and puts forward a suitable method of knowledge characterization, so as to expand the research path of “immaterial” gardens depicted in the poems. [Methods] The utilization of text mining, knowledge graph and associated technologies, in conjunction with the Forty Scenes of Yuanmingyuan and the Yangshi Lei Archives, along with other historical materials, facilitates the characterization of the imperial poetry texts regarding the Fuhai area in Yuanmingyuan during the Qianlong period. This characterization employs literary cartography and semantic network analysis to elucidate the linkage mechanism between the objective material elements in the ten scenes of the Fuhai area and the subjective behavioral perceptions. Initially, the aforesaid poems are subject to the steps of physical lexicon production, word division, word annotation, and data cleaning. The four types of elements, namely architecture, environment, behavior and perception, are then extracted. These elements are then combined with the 3D spatial model to create a layout map and to map the local semantic network corresponding to the physical object and the spatial layout. Secondly, the four types of elements are automatically recognized by software, supplemented by manual recognition and correction, to obtain the strength of semantic

No abstract available

The present study has as its starting point a theoretical framework contained in the Neohelicon Journal previous numbers, to which recent studies relating literature and space are added, not from a common, geographical perspective, but demonstrating that the evolution of the novel is observed through the narrative analysis of the itinerary and the map. The case studies are taken from Romanian prose, the common point being the reference to space: Ion Ghica’s, A Journey from Bucharest to Iași before 1848, Duiliu Zamfirescu Love in the Countryside, Nicolae Rădulescu-Niger’s On the Azure Coast. A Winter in Menton in 1914, Camil Petrescu’s The Last Night of Love, the First Night of War and Hortensia Papadat-Bengescu’s The Disheveled Maidens. Our approach observes the interactions between rural and urban areas, their coexistence, and the inevitable presence of the “urban villager” who is connected to the functioning of the entire society, not only Romanian, but especially the “insular” or “peninsular” one, in the terms of Fernando Cabo Aseguinolaza.

No abstract available

This paper attempts a brief literature review through the history of literary maps to recent digital mappings, exploring geocriticism as an emerging literary theory in spatial humanities. The paper investigates the ways in which digital literary maps could be used in feminist criticism as feminist geocriticism to develop new ways in reading and analysing feminist texts. It also aims to propose "feminist geocriticism" as a methodology by which this intersection can be effectively utilized to identify and analyze the relations between the different socio-cultural female identities ("intersectionality" of Kimberley Crenshaw [4]) and space.

Place studies form an important part of modern cultural studies and literary discourse. Place is a physical location bounded with territories. Places at all scales are constructed by means of physical and cultural elements. Borrowing theoretical ideas from modern geographic models, literary studies project home as a geographical unit. Vikram Chandra’s Sacred Games published in 2006, abounds with spatial imaginaries ranging from nation to home. Homespace in Sacred Games is not a linear place; it is multiply situated. There are different dimensions for any place at any scale. Home has physical, geographical territories and abstract, cultural boundaries. Homespaces are made unique with their boundaries of sight, sound, taste, and tactile experiences. The possibilities of an individualized time sequence and historical existence may highlight any homespace as a new geographic model itself. Its spatial and temporal territories are subject to overlapping. Home is an imagined community wrought with the utopian concepts of companionship and belonging as it is portrayed in Sacred Games. The making of homespace is intertwined with the underlying gendered practices, institutional ideologies and economic structures. Home, as a power ridden place, produces disciplined bodies and acts as a site of conflict. Institution of marriage, religion, nationality, and legal systems are always active in the homescapes. Homespace in Sacred Games is simultaneously a contested place, open to struggle and conflict and an alternative place with subversive power.

Abstract Ostrava used to be one of the significant industrial and cultural centres of Silesia. It became part of Czechoslovakia in 1918, with the character of the territory being multi-ethnic, multilingual, and with industrial dynamics. This article explores various approaches to literary cartography and establishes a method of creating a printed Literary Map of Ostrava 1918–2018 (including places, events, personalities, institutions, texts). The map is trying to record the emergence, consolidation and transformation of the literary identity of the city of Ostrava over a period of one hundred years. It presents the aspects that determined the character of the map (including among others, the back part of map which includes interpretations, uses the princip of synecdoche and aspects of complexity too). It depicts the emergence reference of individual points on the map in relation to the historical, socio-economic, political and religious aspects of the city and includes work with temporal and spatial layers which were used in the preparation of the thematic map. The map presents, through the application of synoptic literary map theory, the nature of the semantic network through which literary history is reflected. It explains the inspirational significance of a cartographic treatment of literary history that goes beyond locational character. It not a map of fictional places.

The present article juxtaposes the fictional world of two major contemporary literary figures, namely Elif Shafak and Amin Maalouf through two bestselling opuses, The Forty Rules of Love and Leo the African respectively. It investigates how the two texts’rereading of Arab Muslim history operates a discursive manipulation, which not only remaps the world cartography but more importantly designs textualities as ‘contact zones’, thus rehabilitating the ascendency of Oriental space and celebrating its multicultural essence, its civilizational stakes, and its unique spirituality.

Born from both spatial theories in the vein of Foucault and Lefebvre as well as research in a vast diversity of disciplines (geography, cartography, cultural studies, urban studies, sociology, ecology, and more), Geocriticism is interdisciplinary by nature and therefore serves as an example of what other criticism can and should strive for: intellectual interconnectedness. By using geocriticism as a practical model, this paper argues that, ideally applied, theoretical lenses are more than merely an excuse for the perpetuation of academic jargon; they are a necessary response to contemporary concerns. This article examines the emergence of geocriticism, its principles, and a sample of recent scholarship engaging with the theory in a meaningful way.

No abstract available

The study focuses on problems of literary cartography. Part one deals with basic issues such as the definition of the discipline and attempts to define its basic taxonomy, and also presents selected literary-cartographic projects. Part two presents literary-cartographic models that are part of the literary corpora of Czech prose. Specifically, it deals with models of the fictional topography of Prague in the work of selected Czech writers. The aim is not only to demonstrate what such models look like, but, above all, to present a way of working with them in the process of literary interpretation.

Song of Solomon, a novel written by the renowned author Toni Morrison, who won the Nobel Prize in 1993. This novel shows Milkman’s ultimate liberation, from an isolated black community to a utopian black community built by Morrison. It is his journey to find his root and a means to realize his cultural belief. This paper delves into the spatial anxiety in Song of Solomon from the perspective of literary cartography. Literary cartography will make us understand Toni Morrison’s mapping skills to help the protagonist in Song of Solomon away from anxiety of disorientation, finally find identity and finish self-construction. This essay will provide new ideas about related research on Toni Morrison and her works.

This geographical information systems (GIS) reading of Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian: Or the Evening Redness in the West (1985) provides a literary geography analysis that plots latitude and longitude coordinates in conjunction with Mikhail M. Bakhtin’s chronotopes of the Road, the Rabelaisian, the Petty-Bourgeois Provincial Town, the Threshold and the political cartography of the United States–Mexico border established by the 1849 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo to map the emergence of an American Imperial chronotope. Blood Meridian is a fictionalized account of historical events carried out by the Glanton Gang, a band of mercenaries contracted by Governor Trias in 1849 to counter the threat of Apache raids in Chihuahua province, Mexico. Viewed through the lenses of a GIS/MAXQDA platform, Blood Meridian comes into focus as ‘cartographical novel’ illuminating its literary geography as a melange, spun from allusions to and spatial remediations of Classical, medieval and Indigenous mythologies. The GIS/MAXQDA platform frames Blood Meridian as deep chronotopic map that, in tracing the spiralling lifepath of its protagonist, the ‘Kid’, across the terra damnata of the American Southwest and northern Mexico, creates an analogy and spatial metaphor for the violent geographical teleology of US nineteenth-century westward expansion which unfolded between the 1830s and 1880s.

No abstract available

This paper examines Shakespeare's The Tempest through the lens of cartography to explore the themes of demonization and colonialism and how they can lead to the dehumanization of non-western people. It also focuses on the process of reducing non-Europeans, particularly Muslims, to subhuman status. Previous academic studies on Shakespeare's The Tempest have not sufficiently examined the geographical and cartographic elements underlying the play's investigation of demonization and colonization. Therefore, the primary objective of this study is to examine the geographical connections and cartographic complexities, as well as the complex depiction and consequences of demonization and colonization in Shakespeare's The Tempest. Tackling the enigma of Prospero's Island by systematically examining the literary cartographic framework of Shakespeare’s The Tempest, it became apparent that Ibiza is the island that inspired Shakespeare. The authors support their claim by providing pertinent evidence corresponding to Shakespeare's depictions and descriptions of Prospero's Island. Keywords: Shakespeare’s The Tempest, Cartography, Colonialism, Demonization, Ibiza, Representation.

This comparative analysis of R.M. Ballantyne's The Giant of the North and William Gordon Stables's Wild Adventures Round the Pole will demonstrate that, in the late 19th century, British polar adventure narratives elude conventional maps, and as the characters explore uncharted regions of the Arctic, the fictional texts themselves become literary maps leading to an imperial North Pole. This article examines the limits of Western cartography of the Arctic, which reveals several layers of cartographic uncertainty in the narratives. It then focuses on how the characters develop alternative and more dynamic mapping strategies reflecting the ever-changing icescape. Finally, this study shows that the success of the dash to the North Pole reveals the ambivalent colonial overtones of juvenile adventure fiction. This section includes an analysis of the illustrative map featured in Ballantyne's The Giant of the North and focuses on the

R. K. Narayan’s Malgudi—often romanticized as a placid South Indian town immune to the violent churn of national politics—conceals beneath its fictional gentility a textured cartography of spatial marginalization. This paper interrogates how Narayan’s literary topography tacitly enforces erasures through ambient invisibilisation of Dalit presence. While overt brutality is absent, spatial cues like the alleyways, outskirts, temples, wells etc. carry a silent semiotics of caste-based exclusion. By reading Malgudi not merely as backdrop but as a living structure of social code, this essay explores how caste operates ambiently, through architecture, silence, and routine gesture. Fundamentally, the absence of Dalits is not a void but a strategically ambient construct—where the social body reaffirms itself through who is not seen, not heard, not located at the center. This study conducts close readings of The Dark Room, The Guide, and a few selected short stories, resisting the temptation to retroactively “spot” Dalits and instead focusing on spatial strategies of occlusion and the material politics of literary geography. Drawing on theorists such as Gopal Guru, Doreen Massey, Michel de Certeau, and Sunil Khilnani, the analysis situates Malgudi within broader discourses of caste and space, attending to the ambient violences that enable its quiet realism. It argues that Narayan’s ostensibly apolitical realism in fact relies on spatial segregation to maintain a normative Brahmanical order—rendering Malgudi complicit in a project of caste erasure by design. Such a reading reframes the town as a cartography of caste-coded absence not as a benign cultural artefact. Rather than dismiss Narayan, however, the paper invites a more ethically alert reading—one that asks not only what is narrated but also where and who is excluded in the process.

Moving beyond the critical binary between formalism and sociohistoricism that has polarized readings of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha's Dictée , this article specifies how Cha forges avant‐garde formalism into a political instrument for diasporic expression. Synthesizing crip theory, new materialism, and affect theory, this article argues that Dictée functions as a performative cartography, mapping the diasporic condition as a specific mode of structural and somatic disablement. Integrating Asian American disability studies, this study analyzes this practice less as a representation of trauma and more as a mode of knowing grounded in the experience of being socially and linguistically disabled by normative national structures. It traces three interlocking layers: the unsettled temporalities of crip time, the material geography of the book as an archival body, and the affective terrains generated within the reader. In so doing, this reading offers Asian American literary studies a critical vocabulary for reframing formal difficulty as an embodied political strategy and expands postmodern geography by positioning the body as a primary site of historical inscription.

The work enables the construction of a Geo-Literary cartography with emphasis on landscape and memory from the novel “Os Igaraúnas” by Raimundo de Morais. The work written in 1938, has characteristic elements of History, Geography and Literature through a literary fiction and narrative thread in which the Brazilian Amazon is portrayed, in the state of Pará in the temporality of the first quarter of the twentieth century. Its geographic location is a site near Cametá-PA, on the Tocantins River. It addresses customs, practices, knowledge and values of subjects from the lower and middle Tocantins region. It presents elements of Physical and Cultural Geography, religiosities, political and economic aspects

The erudite priest Marciano Di Leo (1751–1819), a prominent personality in the historical and geographical panorama of his time, not only in his home territory, authored a vast literary and poetic production, but also tried his hand at producing some maps, referring to a province of the Kingdom of Naples. At a time when the principles of geodetic cartography had become increasingly known, even locally, hand in hand with improvements in technology and accuracy of measurements, the author reflects the historical narratives of progress of the European (and Neapolitan) Enlightenment and translates them into an unpublished manuscript of statistical, historical, and geographical nature, accompanied by numerous maps of various scales. The rediscovery of a largely unknown—and therefore not very thorough—minor cartographic production underscores the spread even in more marginal contexts of the most innovative ideas and increasingly precise scientific foundations in the cartographic-mathematical representation of the territory. It also illustrates the role of a number of intellectuals in the service of the political choices of their time, in an attempt-often unrealized-to bring about a decisive change of course in public administration, in accordance with Enlightenment ideals and in the spirit of reform that spread throughout Europe thanks to the French Revolution.

ABSTRACT Augustine Fouillée's (alias G. Bruno's) Le tour de la France par deux enfants, a children's geography textbook initially published in 1877, has long been considered a nation-building tool in the Third Republic. This essay draws on critical approaches to cartography in order to show how the contradictory modes of mapping throughout the Tour can clarify its generic complexity. Such forms of spatial knowledge would take on new resonances through the book's travels, adaptations, and remediations in a colonial context, from Indochina to French West Africa. Tracing these migrations offers a dialectical, transnational approach to the spatial analysis of literary narrative.

The intention of this discussion is to explore how a sense of place can emerge when narrative inclusions are aligned to topographical mapping to create literary cartography artefacts after a geocritical review of a real place: Walyalup/Fremantle, Western Australia. This discussion will explore the underlying methodology of geocriticism (Tally Jr. 2013; Westphal 2011) applied through experimental mapping processes (De Nardi 2014; Pearce 2008; Powell 2010) to construct narrative maps that offer perspectives on how Walyalup/Fremantle’s districts have distinct thematic patterns emerging from the geocritical review and can be used to support the creative writing of real places. The district covered here is the West End, which also was the original location of the Swan River Colony and represents interesting collisions between the past and the present. This district is then used with an excerpt of creative writing to demonstrate the application of this model. The larger intention of this analysis is the development of literary cartographic maps to be utilised in a place-based creative writing project that intends to contribute to the storied history already in existence in Walyalup/Fremantle.

ABSTRACT This article offers to postcolonial literary studies a case study of Borneo grappling with its colonial legacy and cultural identity by exploring the dynamic interplay between place and identity in Yongping Li’s two-volume novel, Da He Jin Tou (The End of the River). Using a theoretical framework rooted in postcolonial geo-humanities, including the concept of place in postcolonialism, Yi-Fu Tuan’s notion of “topophilia”, and Robert Tally’s literary cartography, the article argues that Li’s mapping of Borneo as a dynamic interactive space offers entry into a process of affective identification that transcends national borders and ethnicity. To achieve this, the article first contextualizes Li’s Borneo writing within a postcolonial spatial framework, and then proceeds to analyse the novel, highlighting a meeting between Tuan’s humanistic geography as related to place and affective bond, and Tally’s literary mapping of spatiality to demonstrate Li’s identification with the textured and affectively charged Borneo.

This article examines the distinctive features of urban narrative construction in the works of Chelyabinsk writer Dmitry Bavilsky. The primary objective of this study is to identify specific interpretative variations of urban text within the framework of the cycle “Noun.” The methodological foundation of the research is grounded in the principles of narratology, approaches from geopoetics, and the concepts of mental cartography, which allow for the delineation of a unique vision of the cityscape. It is demonstrated that the urban narrative in D. Bavilsky’s cycle “Noun” emphasizes a particular chronotope of the city, described through the lens of its periphery: Cherdachinsk (a name resonant with Chelyabinsk) exists at the boundary of a specific geographical locus while simultaneously straddling different worlds. The authors highlight that the city in Bavilsky’s works is intricately linked to the image of a protagonist striving to comprehend their own “self” through spatial perception, articulating a state of “non-belonging,” and filling it with subjective value characteristics. It is noted that a leading technique in Bavilsky’s text construction is antithesis. The analysis of the material allows for an enrichment of the traditions surrounding the study of Chelyabinsk text and Bavilsky’s oeuvre, characterizing a high level of reflection on the image of the city in the writer’s work.

In the USA, road lines guide both American travel literature and the nation’s history of westward expansion. From western films to road movies, the road has become a specific space-time woven from the mythologies of the Frontier, wilderness, progress, as well as an imaginary of freedom and new beginnings. However, traditional road representations now face technological advances, environmental consciousness, and global crisis. The rise of post-apocalyptic road narratives signals a genre shift, questioning the myth of universal mobility tied to an ideologic conception of liberty. This study delves into this evolution, analyzing pessimistic yet realistic post-apocalyptic road novels and films like Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, John Hillcoat’s adaptation, Dave Eggers’s Heroes of the Frontier, and Casey Affleck’s Light of my Life. Drawing from Bakhtin’s chronotope theory and the transmedial nature of the road narrative, it investigates how the road operates as a space-time for individual travel tales and the American national narrative, undergoing shifts in mobility, history, and narration. The post-apocalyptic backdrop redefines family ethics within the road narrative, envisioning the road as a space-time for transmitting stories and collective memories.

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Aim. By analyzing the contradictions visible today in Gogol’s description of Russian roads, to formulate the “Gogol’s paradox” and use it to analyze the meaning of roads in the Russian management system in the Gogol era and today, in a situation of threats and challenges associated with digitalization.Methodology. The research is deeply interdisciplinary and is carried out using a set of general scientific and narrowly interdisciplinary approaches and methods, among which the central place is occupied by systemic, dialectical, semiotic and holistic methods, as well as the method of identifying and analyzing paradoxes.Results. It is demonstrated that the contradiction in Gogol’s description of roads arises in our era due to a change in the meaning and cybernetic purpose of roads resulting from progressive digitalization. It is shown that the ongoing social-technogenic changes can be described in the optics of the concept of chronotope. It is noted that these changes were anticipated in the Russian culture, which proposed the Digital Earth and an alternative signless management architecture.Research implications. The theoretical significance of the obtained result lies in the reconstruction of the place of the road in the creation of the national chronotope of Russia, in the establishment of the existence of signless information carriers and in the possibility of their practical use in management systems. The practical result is associated with the extreme urgency of Russia’s development in the situation of the struggle for the global dominance of a new network-centric management paradigm based on the Digital Earth, and in the revision of the national chronotope.

The article deals with the geographical component of the chronotope of the English scientific discourse. The authors identify the forms of geographical representation of the chronotope of scientific discourse, determine the degree of identifiability of these forms, and also explore the significance of the geographical component of the chronotope in the categorization of scientific discourse. 112 English scientific articles from 4 disciplinary areas (linguistics, literature, economics, biology) published in scientific periodicals are used as practical material. In the course of the study, the authors discover three types of geographical markers used in the texts of scientific discourse: the topos of publishing a scientific work, the topos of writing a scientific work, and the topos of the object, subject and material of the study (intratext topos). The authors analyze the degree of identification of each type of markers in scientific texts, and also conduct a comparative analysis of these markers. The level of coincidence of the topos of the publication, the topos of writing and the topos of the object of study is investigated. As a result of the analysis, the authors observe a low level of interdependence of geographical markers, which suggests that the geographical component of the chronotope is of little importance for the categorization of a scientific text. On the basis of the data obtained, the authors believe that the geographical markers of a scientific text should be perceived as elements of the formal and technical design of a scientific text, and not as its constituent characteristic. In conclusion, the authors give a number of directions for further considering the constituent topos in the chronotope of scientific discourse, in particular, its disciplinary and thematic component.

This article proposes a critical framework for understanding the intersection of three dynamic fields: Digital Humanities (DH), studies of transnational mobility, and environmental narrative. Moving beyond the traditional confines of textual analysis, it argues that the methodological toolkit of the Digital Humanities-including geospatial mapping, network analysis, and large-scale text mining-provides the essential means to trace, visualize, and analyze the complex relationships between human movement and environmental imagination across national and cultural boundaries. The article first establishes the theoretical underpinnings of this convergence, drawing from ecocriticism, postcolonial theory, and mobility studies. It then presents a conceptual "Three-Dimensional Analysis Framework" that integrates spatial, relational, and semantic layers of inquiry. Through illustrative case studies, the article demonstrates how DH methods can map the "eco-geographies" in transnational novels, uncover the networked agencies in climate change discourse, and track the semantic shifts in environmental rhetoric across different cultural contexts. The analysis reveals that this triple convergence not only expands the scale and precision of literary and cultural analysis but also fosters a more nuanced, systemic understanding of the global ecological crisis as a narratively constructed and materially consequential phenomenon. The article concludes by addressing the ethical and methodological challenges of this approach and posits its potential for fostering a more planetary, interdisciplinary mode of humanistic inquiry.

Hannah Crafts ’ s autobiographically in fl uenced work The Bondswoman ’ s Narrative was written, but not published, circa 1853 – 1859. Nearly a century and a half later, the manuscript was recovered by Henry Louis Gates Jr. in an auction by Swann Galleries, after which it was subsequently published for the fi rst time in 2002. The novel recalls the fi rst-person narrator Hannah ’ s eventful life in slavery, which included stints with three masters and a white benefactor; a lengthy but unsuccessful fi rst runaway attempt; and eventually a second and ultimately successful escape e ff ort. One of the distinctive features of The Bondswoman ’ s Narrative is its attention to landscape, nature, and geographical place. Over the course of the novel, the narrator recounts her travels from a plantation in Virginia to the urban commotion of Washington, DC, before heading southward again to North Carolina and then eventually escaping to New Jersey. Along the way, Crafts provides rich descriptions of various geographical terrains from lush forests and open fi elds to quaint villages and turbulent roads. The scholarship on Crafts ’ s novel has also been keen on Crafts ’ s attention to environment and place, particularly for the ways in which Crafts ’ s reference to place help to verify the autobiographical nature of her story. Indeed, since the publication of Henry Louis Gates ’ s introductory essay, scholars have analyzed, explained, and/or questioned the veracity of Hannah Crafts ’ s narrative and the identity of the author by tracking the character Hannah alongside historical places and fi gures. The fi rst and only critical collection of essays

The subject of this research is the burial complex Isteekh Byraan, located on the terraces of the right bank of the Lena River and in part of the adjoining valley. The complex consists of several cemeteries from different time periods, integrated into the natural landscape: this includes the top of the terrace, its southern foothills, and the high bank of the stream flowing beneath the terraces. The focus of the study is the burial complex and historical events in the context of the natural landscape. The aim is to establish a connection between historical events, individuals, and the names of places within the natural landscape, as well as to introduce field materials into circulation. Data on the physical and geographical conditions of the burial complex have been summarized, as the natural factor may have played a significant role in the choice of this area as a burial site. Oral material regarding microtoponyms and the narrative of the monument was collected from local residents, and discussions were held during scientific and practical conferences and round tables dedicated to the history of the Khangalassky ulus. The complex terrain of the area, which had developed by the time the pasture settlers inhabited it, determined the location of the burial sites. It is likely that the picturesque landscapes corresponded to aesthetic and religious beliefs, as the burial complex and residential areas are located nearby. It was discovered that some of the existing microtoponyms can be attributed to earlier layers and have lost their meaningful significance. It is likely that the preserved oral tradition reflects previously existing rules of land distribution and inheritance among the local nobility and aristocracy. The study has demonstrated the potential of this direction and could be expanded into a collaborative interdisciplinary study of the monument.

ABSTRACT:Anthropogenic sea-level rise is forcing—and will force—extraordinary measures in adaptation and retreat. At the same time, it is compelling conventions in aesthetics, geography, and narrative to contend with fundamental challenges to description, reference, perception, and place. This article examines Elizabeth Rush's Rising: Dispatches from the New American Shore (2018), an ambitious and sensitive account of the impacts of sea-level rise on coastal communities in the United States. Among Rising's proliferating seascapes, inundation tends to entail a fundamental loss of place, and open waters tend to prove inhospitable to history and memory. The article situates these tendencies among theories of aqueous and marine location, systems of narrative reference, and settler-colonial traditions in spatiality. I read Rising as a statement, poignant and perturbing, of anthropogenic sea-level rise as a creeping catastrophe for certain conventions in interpretation, imagination, and representation—and an impetus to recognize and amplify alternate ontologies. My wider purpose is threefold: to furnish one method for accessing and interpreting the literatures of sea-level rise; to identify the imaginative constraints impinging on certain liquid imaginaries; and to gesture toward the presence and promise of other visions. I aim, ultimately, to help demonstrate the poetic polysemy that incoming waters can be heard, and read, to supply—and to make place for the voices of those who are helping situate their, and "our," watery futures.

This volume aimed to highlight narrative identities of European cities or city neighbourhoods that have been overlooked, such as mid-sized cities. These cities are neither small towns nor metropolises, cities that are now unveiling their appeal or specificity. The present special issue thus covers a range of representations of cities. The articles investigate more systematically how different texts deal with various cities from different experiential and fictional perspectives. The issue covers the geographical scope across Europe, from east to west or vice versa, as well as a range of different works of national literature(s), but with a clear emphasis on mid-sized European cities that have until now been deemed as lesser-known, secondary, peripheral, ‘other’ cities that are in the focus of the research of the COST project Writing Urban Places. New Narratives of the European City, within which this journal issue is being published.

Using a research tool such as geocriticism involves both the risk of reducing the way we relate to a literary text, but, on the other hand, it has an essential stake: along with the evolution of society, the conception of space was reflected in literature. With each major change of the crossed time stages, space has become a reliable witness in rendering the realities that have become narrative scenarios in the prose of writers, receptive to the social phenomenon. Our approach is built around the concept of geocriticism, but also its application to some Romanian novels published at a considerable temporal distance: from Slavici, to Camil Petrescu, G. Călinescu and Mircea Cărtărescu, each text becoming a sample of the demonstration of the functioning of the exposed method.

ABSTRACT Virtual geographical environments (VGEs) are being used to represent our sense of place through the application of extended-reality or cross-reality (XR) technologies with a focus on technological advancement and immersion. In light of this, we propose that an expanded and interdisciplinary understanding of the concept of immersion is required to facilitate an understanding of spatial data to a broader audience. The potential of focusing on narrative immersion and literary placemaking in VGEs is discussed to evoke a stronger sense of place and a feeling of presence and belonging in users. This paper seeks to highlight the unique affordances and potentialities of XR narrative style GIS digital representations through an interdisciplinary theoretically lead analysis of outputs created by the Building City dashboards project towards the goal of expanding audiences of non-specialist stakeholders in urban planning processes.

ABSTRACT Despite scholarly interest in how emotional and instrumental place attachments motivate entrepreneurship, the influences on embeddedness remain underexplored. Building on the notion that entrepreneurship becomes embedded in a locality, we argue that this process is packed with place-based interpretations of the material and imagined reality. Engaging with the empirical setting of Chile, the world’s largest copper producer, we embark on a study examining the interactions between the place attachment, embeddedness and natural resource-based entrepreneurship. We uncover these interactions through analysing several works of poetry by Nobel laureate Pablo Neruda, which focus on the diverging place attachment styles between local and multinational agents. Through reflecting on the poems, we show how historical changes within the Chilean mining industry and broader societal changes are visible in Neruda’s imagery of place attachments, emotions and concerns for local conditions. We problematize embeddedness and entrepreneurship through illuminating the place attachments shaping local actors’ entrepreneurial imagination, thus contributing to knowledge about being embedded in natural resource-based entrepreneurship contexts. We provide new insights into how place attachment can evolve alongside different forms of embedded entrepreneurship.