Recently, literary critics and some historians have argued that to use the language of separate spheres is to "mistake fiction for reality." However, the tendency in this criticism is to ignore the work of feminist political theorists who argue that a range of ideologies of the public and private consistently work to mask gender inequalities. In Keeping Up Her Geography, Tanya Ann Kenedy argues that these inequalities are shaped by multiple, but interconnected, spatial constructions of the public and private in US culture. Moreover, the early twentieth century when key spatial concepts – the nation, the urban, the regional, and the domestic – were being redefined is a pivotal era for understanding how the public-private binary remains tenaciously central to the defining of gender. Keeping Up Her Geography shows that this is the case in a range of literary and cultural contexts: in feminist speeches at the World’s Columbian Exposition, in middle-class women’s urban reform texts, in southern writer Ellen Glasgow’s novels, and in the autobiographical narratives of Zora Neale Hurston and Agnes Smedley.

In the early 1970s, empowered by the civil rights and women's movements, a new group of women writers began speaking to the American public. Their topic, broadly defined, was the postmodern American West. By the mid-1980s, their combined works made for a bona fide literary groundswell in both critical and commercial terms. However, as Krista Comer notes, despite the attentions of publishers, the media, and millions of readers, literary scholars have rarely addressed this movement or its writers. Too many critics, Comer argues, still enamored of western images that are both masculine and antimodern, have been slow to reckon with the emergence of a new, far more "feminine," postmodern, multiracial, and urban west. Here, she calls for a redesign of the field of western cultural studies, one that engages issues of gender and race and is more self-conscious about space itself_especially that cherished symbol of western "authenticity," open landscape. Surveying works by Joan Didion, Wanda Coleman, Maxine Hong Kingston, Leslie Marmon Silko, Barbara Kingsolver, Pam Houston, Louise Erdrich, Sandra Cisneros, and Mary Clearman Blew, Comer shows how these and other contemporary women writers have mapped new geographical imaginations upon the cultural and social spaces of today's American West.

Flaps, tabs, word balloons, and pop-ups illustrate the geography of the Earth and solar system. Comes with a "pop-up globe to twirl" that is not attached to the book.

This book explores the intricate interplay between physical spaces and psychological landscapes in the works of Irish-American author Maeve Brennan. Brennan’s writing is now classed amongst the most important of twentieth-century Irish women’s fiction, having undergone a significant reclamation and reappraisal in the 30 years since her death. Single and childfree for most of her life, Brennan eschewed the securities of family and home, experiencing an "otherness" that she shared with her fellow New Yorkers, many of them left, she wrote, hanging on to a city half-capsized––“most of them still able to laugh as they cling to the island that is their life’s predicament.” It is a suitably ambiguous expression for a writer who cultivated an interstitial existence, whose stories inhere within a dream cycle of reiterative pasts, and whose works augment and elevate the canon of radical Irish fiction.

In her Los Angeles Review of Books essay “Who Is Who: Pronouns, Gender, and Merging Selves,” Dana Levin describes Stacey Waite’s fusion of gender identities: “Pseudonyms, heteronyms, personae, all the ventriloquizing literary arts; point of view and tonal shifts: these are tools for speakers and speaking. But the sentence too has a voice: ‘i will not be the kind of boy who can not bear the memory of her body’ ... This is [Waite’s] genius ... to take innocuous syntactical phrasing and change the players mid-sentence — to get around English’s pronominal either/or by creating a syntactical both/and...” “In this arresting collection, Stacey Waite is a pathfinder, charting with disarming honesty, humor, pathos and willful perplexity the uncertain terrain of gender in ways that shatter assumptions, unsettle easy presumptions, and yet, through the sheer grace of her craft and deft language, that open us to the beauty of our strange human enterprise.” — Kwame Dawes

I am very pleased to have been asked by Rod Gerber to provide a preface to such a book. Not least because of the twenty-four chapters, eight are written by former students or colleagues with whom I have worked in the past and whom I still meet at conferences on geographical education. It is with a certain pride and joy that I note the progress which has been made in geographical education both in its day to day teaching and in research, in the twenty years following the end of my term of office as Chair of the Commission on Geographical Education of the International Geographical Union (CGEIUG). My successors, Joe Stoltman, Hartwig Haubrich, Rod Gerber and now Lea Houtsonen, have done much and are continuing to work hard, to foster the development of geographical education. This book is proof, if proof were needed, that the international collaboration in this field, is alive and well, with contributions coming from all the continents (except Antarctica!). It would be a moribund subject that remained unaffected in one way or another by developments on the 'great world stage', as Fairgrieve (1926) would have put it. And, as Rod Gerber shows, the issues of globalisation, of cultural encounters, of differing value systems, of new technologies, of variable economic development and of environmental quality, all feature as topics which influence and are influenced by, geographical education.

Mentoring Geography Teachers in the Secondary School supports both new and experienced mentors in developing their knowledge and skills in mentoring in geography education. Within the book, chapter authors critically consider how mentoring has been conceptualised and represented in policy and academic debate, as well as examining how mentoring in geography education has been experienced and perceived in practice. Chapters in the book explore a range of perspectives, experiences and aspects of mentoring geography teachers, including: • Critical engagement with educational policy and practice • Perspectives from beginning geography teachers • Mentoring as a professional development opportunity • The value of engaging with the geography education community in teacher education • How mentoring meetings and conversations can support beginning geography teachers in their growth and development This book is a vital source of support and inspiration for all those involved in developing the next generation of geography teachers. The themes of justice, agency and voice - raised and engaged with implicitly and explicitly throughout this edited collection - are of critical importance to mentors, beginning teachers and geography education more broadly in developing and enacting a progressive vision of mentoring.