An innovative, interdisciplinary study of cartography as a significant multifaceted cultural practice in Romantic period culture.

Transpacific Cartographies examines how contemporary Chinese diasporic narratives address the existential loss of home for immigrant communities at a time of global precarity and amid rising Sino-US tensions. Focusing on cultural productions of the Chinese diaspora from the 1990s to the present -- including novels by the Sinophone writers Yan Geling (The Criminal Lu Yanshi), Shi Yu (New York Lover), Chen Qian (Listen to the Caged Bird Sing), and Rong Rong (Notes of a Couple), as well as by the Anglophone writer Ha Jin (A Free Life; A Map of Betrayal), selected TV shows (Beijinger in New York; The Way We Were), and online literature -- Melody Yunzi Li argues that the characters in these stories create multilayered maps that transcend the territorial boundaries that make finding a home in a foreign land a seemingly impossible task. In doing so, these “maps” outline a transpacific landscape that reflects the psycho-geography of homemaking for diasporic communities. Intersecting with and bridging Sinophone studies, Chinese American studies, and diaspora studies and drawing on theories of literary cartography, Transpacific Cartographies demonstrates how these “maps” offer their readers different paths for finding a sense of home no matter where they are.

Romantic Cartographies is the first collection to explore the reach and significance of cartographic practice in Romantic-period culture. Revealing the diverse ways in which the period sought to map and spatialise itself, the volume also considers the engagement of our own digital cultures with Romanticism's 'map-mindedness'. Original, exploratory essays engage with a wide range of cartographic projects, objects and experiences in Britain, and globally. Subjects range from Wordsworth, Clare and Walter Scott, to Romantic board games and geographical primers, to reveal the pervasiveness of the cartographic imagination in private and public spheres. Bringing together literary analysis, creative practice, geography, cartography, history, politics and contemporary technologies – just as the cartographic enterprise did in the Romantic period itself – Romantic Cartographies enriches our understanding of what it means to 'map' literature and culture.

This pioneering study offers dynamic new answers to Christian Jacob's question: 'What are the links that bind the map to writing?'

Curious Travellers: Writing the Welsh Tour, 1760-1820 provides the first extensive literary study of British tours of Wales in the Romantic period (c.1760-1820). It examines writers' responses to Welsh landscapes and communities at a time of drastic economic, environmental, and political change. Opening with an overview of Welsh tours up to the early 1700s, Mary-Ann Constantine shows how the intensely intertextual nature of the genre imbued particular sites and locations with meaning. She next draws upon a range of manuscript and published sources to trace a circular tour of the country, unpicking moments of cultural entanglement and revealing how travel-writing shaped understanding of Wales and Welshness within the wider British polity. Wales became a popular destination for visitors following the publication of Thomas Pennant's Tours in Wales in the late 1770s. Hundreds of travel-accounts from the period are extant, yet few (particularly those by women) have been studied in depth. Wales proves, in these narratives, as much a place of disturbance as a picturesque haven--a potent mixture of medieval past and industrial present, exposed down its west coast to the threat of invasion during the Napoleonic Wars. From castles to copper-mines, Constantine explores the full potential of tour writing as an idiosyncratic genre at the interface of literature and history, arguing for its vital importance to broader cultural and environmental studies.

This collection of essays turns on a shift in Romantic studies from viewing wholeness as an absolute value to critiquing it as a limiting construction. Wholeness and its concomitant sense of harmony, rather than a natural given, is a construct that was assembled and disassembled, theorized and criticized, by diverse authors and artists in a wide variety of disciplines and socio-historical contexts, and instrumentalized for diverse purposes. The plurality of these constructions – that Goethe’s Urpflanze, for example, is not synonymous with Friedrich Schlegel’s universal progressive poetry – is but one manifestation of how “assembly” strives but fails to be absolute. The “other” of assembly referenced in the title suggests two divergent but inseparable tendencies: firstly, how a construction can take on the appearance of a natural given; and secondly, how assemblages of wholeness harbor within themselves their own principle of disarticulation. These two tendencies underlie the “inexhaustible” character of Romantic “gatherings”. As a construction passes itself off as nature, the natural fails to account for itself as a whole. The scope of this volume encompasses the establishment, mapping, and interrogation of assembly and its other in German Romanticism through interdisciplinary studies on literature, aesthetics, philosophy, drama, music, synaesthesia, mathematics, science, and exploration. List of contributors: Beate Allert, Frederick Burwick, Alexis B. Smith, Margaret Strair, Christina Weiler, Joshua Wilner.