"In Literature of Place Melanie Simo looks beyond crowded malls and boarded-up storefronts on Main Street to our collective memory, finding answers to these questions in stories, novels, memoirs, poetry, essays, diaries, travel writing, and nature writing that range in origin from New England and the Southern Highlands to Hawaii and in subject from little gardens to lost or reinhabited places in cities, mill towns, deserts, and woodlands. In her consideration of selected American works from 1890 to 1970 - years that mark the closing of the Western frontier and later openings in space exploration, environmental protection, genetic engineering, and cyberspace - Simo uncovers a literature of place and the often-surprising relationship of place to our daily lives."--BOOK JACKET.

The Role of Place in Literature is a groundbreaking study exploring the use of metaphors and images of place in literature. Lutwack takes a dynamic view of the relationship between place and the action or thought in a work. Drawing comparisons over a wide range of works, principally American and British literature of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, he illustrates how writers have charged different environments with symbolic and psychological meaning.

"John Steinbeck's Salinas Valley. Richard Wright's Chicago. Leslie Marmon Silko's New Mexico. Readers often have strong connections with literary places like these. And some works of literature can even change our understanding of the world we live in. But can place also change our view of literature? Site-Reading advances a place-based approach to literature, reading classic texts through the twin lenses of geographical awareness and environmental thought. This book highlights recent developments in ecocriticism and geocriticism to argue for a theory of "ecospatiality" with nature, space, and story as the three elements of place. Site-Reading reconsiders well-known works of twentieth-century American prose and shows how social and environmental issues always overlap. Travel writer William Least Heat-Moon, whose work embodies the ecospatial perspective, portrays his experiences with place on the local, regional, and continental scales. Classic novels by Silko, Willa Cather, and Ana Castillo-usually discussed in isolation-converge in a way that maps diverse cultural perspectives and environmental threats onto the shared geography of Central New Mexico. A reading of Steinbeck's Salinas Valley Watershed texts investigates the impacts of literary tourism in "Steinbeck Country" before drilling down into Steinbeck's portrayals of spatial development and environmental history. And an innovative analysis of Native Son shows how Richard Wright uses cartographic details to decry the spatial/racial politics of South Side Chicago in the 1930s. In this book, Lowell Wyse shows how place provides the grounds for both human experience and critical practice. By bringing together concepts like literary cartography, deep mapping, and bioregionalism in an "ecospatial" approach, Site-Reading not only maps new terrain between ecocriticism and geocriticism, but also shows why place matters-in the world and in the text"--

"In the last decade, the proliferation and popularity of landscape writing in Britain and Ireland -- often referred to as "the new nature writing' -- has unearthed an intricate labyrinth of horizons to contemporary writing about place. The New Nature Writing: Rethinking Place in Contemporary Literature offers the first critical study of the genre. Drawing on original interviews with authors, archival research, and the latest scholarly work in the fields of literary geographies, critical localism and archipelagic criticism, the book covers the work of such writers as Robert MacFarlane, Richard Mabey and Alice Oswald. Examining the ways in which these writers have engaged with a wide range of different environments, from the edgelands to island spaces, Jos Smith reveals how they recreate a resourceful and dynamic sense of localism in rebellion against the homogenising growth of 'clone town Britain.'"--

Narratives of place link people and geographic location with a cultural imaginary through literature and visual narration. Contemporary literature and film often frame narratives with specific geographic locations, which saturate the narrative with cultural meanings in relation to natural and man-made landscapes. This interdisciplinary collection seeks to interrogate such connections to probe how place is narrativized in literature and film. Utilizing close readings of specific filmic and literary texts, all chapters serve to tease out cultural and historical meanings in respect of human engagement with landscapes. Always mindful of national, cultural and topographical specificity, the book is structured around five core themes: Contested Histories of Place; Environmental Landscapes; Cityscapes; The Social Construction of Place; and Landscapes of Belonging.

Using contemporary literary representations of place, this study focuses on works that have participated in the emergence of new conceptions of place and new place-based identities. The analyses draw on research in cultural geography, cognitive science, urban sociology, and globalization studies.

Since the 1840s, when Victorian England emerged into the modern era and industrial cities became the new cultural centers, regionalist literature has posited itself as an aesthetic alternative to nationalist culture. Yet what differentiates regionalism's claims of authenticity, derived from blood and soil, from those of nationalism? Through close readings and theoretical elaborations, Roberto M. Dainotto reveals the degree to which regionalism mimics nationalism in valorizing ethnic purity. He interprets regionalism not as a genre in the pastoral tradition but as a rhetorical trope, a way of reading in which regionalism figures as the "other" against a historical process that disrupts the organic wholeness of place. Dainotto traces the genealogy of the idea of place in literature, examining European texts from Victorian England to Fascist Italy. He finds, for example, in Thomas Hardy's The Return of the Native a virtual thesaurus of regionalist commonplaces. Elizabeth Gaskell's North and South mediates between Madame de Stal's privileging of the sophisticated north and Jean-Jacques Rousseau's nostalgia for the naive south. The regionalism of the Sicilian philosopher Giovanni Gentile exhibits a deep longing for the humanities as they define Italy and Western culture. Dainotto concludes with a close look at the rhetoric of Nazism and Fascism, dramatizing the convergence of regionalist aesthetics and nationalist ideology in Italy and Germany between the two World Wars.