Across the disciplines, the study of space has undergone a profound and sustained transformation. Space, place, mapping, and geographical imaginations have become commonplace topics in a variety of analytical fields in part because globalization has accentuated the significance of location. While this transformation has led to a renaissance in human geography, it also has manifested itself in the humanities and other social sciences. The purpose of this book is not to announce that space is significant, which by now is well known, but to explore how space is analyzed by a variety of disciplines, to compare and contrast these approaches, identify commonalities, and explore how and why differences appear. The volume includes works by 13 scholars from a variety of geographical regions and disciplines. The chapters combine up-to-date literature reviews concerning the role of space in each discipline and several offer original empirical analyses. Some chapters are concerned with Geography while others explore the role of space in contemporary Anthropology, Sociology, Religion, Political Science, Film, and Cultural Studies. The introduction surveys the development of the spatial turn across the fields under consideration. Despite frequent reference to the spatial turn, this is the first volume to explicitly address how theory and practice concerning space, is used in a variety of fields from diverse conceptual perspectives. This book will appeal to everyone conducting conceptual and theoretical research on space, not simply in Geography, but in related fields as well.

The contemporary fields of the study of culture, the humanities and the social sciences are unfolding in a dynamic constellation of cultural turns. This book provides a comprehensive overview of these theoretically and methodologically groundbreaking reorientations. It discusses the value of the new focuses and their analytical categories for the work of a wide range of disciplines. In addition to chapters on the interpretive, performative, reflexive, postcolonial, translational, spatial and iconic turns, it discusses emerging directions of research. Drawing on a wealth of international research, this book maps central topics and approaches in the study of culture and thus provides systematic impetus for changed disciplinary and transdisciplinary research in the humanities and beyond – e.g., in the fields of sociology, economics and the study of religion. This work is the English translation by Adam Blauhut of an influential German book that has now been completely revised. It is a stimulating example of a cross-cultural translation between different theoretical cultures and also the first critical synthesis of cultural turns in the English-speaking world.

The phrase "spatial turns" signals the growing importance of space as an analytical as well as representational category for culture. The volume addresses such emerging modes of inquiry by bringing together, for the first time, essays that engage with spatial turns, spatiality, and the theoretical implications of both in the context of German culture, history, and theory. Migrating from fields like geography, urban studies, and architecture, the new centrality of space has transformed social-science fields as diverse as sociology, philosophy, and psychology. In cultural studies, productive analyses of space increasingly cut across the studies of literature, film, popular culture, and the visual arts. Spatial Turns brings together essays that apply a spatial analysis to German literature and other media and engages with specifically German theorizations of space by such figures as Siegfried Kracauer and Walter Benjamin. The volume is organized in four sections: "Mapping Spaces" addresses cartography in all forms and in its intersection with culture; "Spaces of the Urban" takes up one of the key sites of spatial studies, the city; "Spaces of Encounter" considers how Germany has become a contact zone for multiple ethnicities; and "Visualized Spaces" concerns the theorization of space in film and new media studies.

Time, Literature and Cartography after the Spatial Turn argues that the spatial turn in literary studies has the unexplored potential to reinvigorate the ways in which we understand time in literature. Drawing on new readings of time in a range of literary narratives, including Vladimir Nabokov’s Ada and James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, Adam Barrows explores literature’s ability to cartographically represent the dense and tangled rhythmic processes that constitute lived spaces. Applying the insights of ecological resilience studies, as well as Henri Lefebvre’s late work on rhythm to literary representations of time, this book offers a sustained examination of literature’s “chronometric imaginary”: its capacity to map the temporal relationships between the human and the non-human, the local and the global.

Following the spatial turn in the humanities and social sciences, Spatial Literary Studies: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Space, Geography, and the Imagination offers a wide range of essays that reframe or transform contemporary criticism by focusing attention, in various ways, on the dynamic relations among space, place, and literature. These essays reflect upon the representation of space and place, whether in the real world, in imaginary universes, or in those hybrid zones where fiction meets reality. Working within or alongside related approaches, such as geocriticism, literary geography, and the spatial humanities, these essays examine the relationship between literary spatiality and different genres or media, such as film or television. The contributors to Spatial Literary Studies draw upon diverse critical and theoretical traditions in disclosing, analyzing, and exploring the significance of space, place, and mapping in literature and in the world, thus making new textual geographies and literary cartographies possible.

This edited collection offers a much-needed interdisciplinary exploration of the longevity and impact of the spatial turn across disciplines. It is aimed at advanced undergraduates, postgraduates and scholars interested in space and place in the humanities and social sciences.

Divided into six chapters, each dealing with different aspects of the spatial in literary studies, the book provides: An overview of the spatial turn in literary theory - from modern philosophy and historicism to cartography and literary theory Introductions to the major theorists such as Michel Foucault, David Harvey, Edward Soja, Erich Auerbach, Georg Lukács, and Mikhail Bakhtin An analysis of spatiality from a variety of perspectives - the writer as map-maker, different literary and critical 'spaces', the concept of literary geography, cartographics and geocriticism. As the first guide to the literature and criticism of 'space', this clear and engaging book is essential reading.