Mapping American Spaces in Literature and Beyond

This edited volume explores areas of research in critical spatial thinking that impact understanding of space, place, and time in a world undergoing rapid change, focusing on American literature and culture. Based on theories that have evolved following the spatial turn (Foucault, Harvey, Soja, Lefebvre, Jameson) and the spatial and geocritical approaches recently developed by Bertrand Westphal and Robert Tally Jr., this volume gathers contributions by young scholars and academics looking at real and imaginary spaces in literature, art, architecture, and digital humanities. By considering space and its real and imaginary representations in cartography and the arts, as well as looking at real and imaginary mapping and remapping in literature and culture, the volume offers new insights into space and place.

Examines how space is represented and understood in the US through literature Focuses on spatial thinking beyond the confines of traditional Western framework Analyzes the literary cartographies of dark, nocturnal, Gothic, dystopian, and labyrinthian spaces

Autorentext

Adina Ciugureanu is Professor Emerita of British and American Literature at Ovidius University, Constanta, Romania. Eduard Vlad is Professor Emeritus of British and American Literature at Ovidius University, Constanta, Romania.

Inhalt

Chapter 1: Introduction.- PART ONE: MAPPING SPACES.- Chapter 2: Spatial Existences: The Significance of Land and Nature for Native Americans.- Chapter 3: Mapping Space and Race in The Los Angeles Times (1880-1932).- Chapter 4: Rockwellian Space: From War Propaganda to the People's Freedoms.- Chapter 5: The Edenic Home: A Spatial Reflection of the American Dream in Frank Lloyd Wright's Architecture.- Chapter 6: Remapping John Quinn's Poetic Oregon Trail: A Poetry of Travel, Observations and Mapmaking.- Chapter 7: Digital Space the New Medium of Life and Life Writing.- Chapter 8: Nathaniel Hawthorne's Rappaccini's Daughter and The Birth-Mark: Between Imaginary Geographies, Ecophobia, and the Trans-Corporeal Female Body.- Chapter 9: American Landscapes and Sites of Imagination in Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita.- Chapter 10: Cormac McCarthy's Appalachian Beginnings of His Comprehensive Cartographic Design.- Chapter 11: Mapping (the) US by a Non-American Black.- PART THREE: EXPLORING SPACES.- Chapter 12: Nocturnal Dead Zones: Socio-political Organization of the Urban Night in Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451.- Chapter 13: Labyrinth of Non-Closure: Getting Lost (and Found) in David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest.- Chapter 14: Spaces of Psychic Fracture in Post-Confessional American Poetry.- Chapter 15: Re-Mapping Gendered Spaces in Michael Cunningham's The Hours.- Chapter 16: Spatial Readings and their Feminist Dimension in Victory City by Salman Rushdie.