Introduction: Collaborations in Literary Geography

In the autumn of 2018, as the days began to lengthen and thoughts turned to the new (European) academic year, a group of geographers, literary scholars and creative practitioners gathered again in Emmanuel College, Cambridge, to discuss current thinking and future directions in literary geography. Recognising that there are and continue to be ‘many different ways in which the field is and has been defined’ (Hones et. al. 2015: 1), the roundtable conference took as its theme ‘collaboration in the theory and practice of literary geography’. The three Thinking Space pieces that follow from this introduction, the first of two collections
of Thinking Space pieces to emerge from the Cambridge conference, provide a small but representative sample of the productive thinking and discussions which took place there, both within the space of the roundtable itself and on the margins. Here, I will briefly discuss the ways in which the conference participants worked together to define and to practice collaboration in literary geography before providing an overview of the Thinking Space pieces and their own points of connection.