Introduction

Abstract

In the early 1990s, I started to use the term geocriticism to refer to an aspect of my research project through which I hoped to bring a greater emphasis to space, place, and mapping in literary studies; this ultimately resulted in a much narrower dissertation topic. At the time, I imagined geocriticism as the critic’s counterpart to what I viewed as the writer’s literary cartography. Using literary cartography, a writer maps the social spaces of his or her world; a geocritic would read these maps, drawing particular attention to the spatial practices involved in literature. Although I thought I may have coined the term, I was not so bold as to think I had come up with the idea of geocriticism, as a large number of scholars, critics, and theorists had been producing works that might be considered geocritical. Among those I had in mind, Kristen Ross’s fascinating work on Rimbaud in The Emergence of Social Space, Edward Said’s “geographical inquiry into historical experience” in Culture and Imperialism, and Fredric Jameson’s expanded notion of cognitive mapping in The Geopolitical Aesthetic provided current examples. But I also considered earlier works, such as Raymond Williams’s The Country and the City, Walter Benjamin’s writings on Paris (especially his unfinished Arcades Project), and Mikhail Bakhtin’s study of “chronotopes.” And this list could be expanded in many different directions once one allows for figurative uses of space and mapping.