Geocriticism

Geocriticism provides a theoretical foundation and a critical exploration of geocriticism, an interdisciplinary approach to understanding literature in relation to space and place. Drawing on diverse thinkers, Westphal argues that a geocritical approach enables novel ways of seeing literary texts and of conducting literary studies.

"Geocriticism is an immensely stimulating and resourceful contribution to the spatial turn in literary criticism, one that offers a distinctive and sophisticated methodology for exploring representations of space." - Textual Practice

"The transdisciplinary spatial turn explodes globally in Geocriticism, a stunning literary tour-de-force that explores real and fictional spaces everywhere on earth. There is no one better than Westphal to interweave the Francophonic and Anglophonic geographical imaginations in ways that enhance our understanding of how geography and literature are critically related. This valuable translation opens the floodgates to European spatial thinking, while at the same time building creatively on the critical geographical literature available in English." - Edward Soja, Professor Emeritus of Urban Planning, University of California, Los Angeles, USA

"When you say you know a city, Paris, for example, how do you separate your flesh-and-blood visits there from your visits to the literary Paris of Baudelaire, of Dickens, of Hemingway? Do all those writers, and the multitude of other writers who have written about Paris, write about the same city? These are among the sorts of marvelous questions about the identity and difference of reality and representation, of sensation and memory, of life and fiction, which Bertrand Westphal's Geocriticism investigates with deftness and rigor. Drawing on postmodern critical currents in philosophy and geography as well as in literary studies, Westphal examines a vast multilingual corpus of literary and cinematic examples to illuminate the field lying at the intersection of lived and imagined space." - John Protevi, Professor of French Studies, Louisiana State University, USA

Translated by Robert T. Tally Jr.: Robert T. Tally Jr. is Associate Professor of English at Texas State University, USA. He is the translator of Bertrand Westphal s Geocriticism: Real and Fictional Spaces.