Literature, Environment, Geography

This chapter brings literary geographies into dialogue with ecocriticism. Both (already interdisciplinary) fields have critically examined the relationship between the material properties of the earth (the geocentric) and the mediations of cultural forms (the sociocentric), but both have navigated this difficult space in different ways, and drawing on different traditions. It begins by introducing the emergence of literary geographies from ‘the spatial turn’, and the development of different waves of ecocriticism, in such a way as to highlight productive points of intersection and dialogue between the two. It then goes on to present some examples of this at work. One the one hand, it argues that ecocriticism might productively engage with the way certain forms of spatial thinking complicate the binary opposition of real, material spaces and literary representations of such spaces (for example, in Edward Soja’s concept of ‘Thirdspace’). On the other hand, it suggests that literary geographies could stand to learn from the way more recent ecocriticism has helped to draw out into visibility new geographies of crisis that can help equip the literary critic to confront the challenges of the Anthropocene.