Johannes Riquet (editor) - Spatial Modernities: Geography, Narrative, Imaginaries

Spatial Modernities

This collection of essays offers a series of reflections on the specific literary and cultural forms that can be seen as the product of modernitys spatial transformations, which have taken on new urgency in todays world of ever increasing mobility and global networks. The book offers a broad perspective on the narrative and poetic dimensions of the modern discourses and imaginaries that have shaped our current geographical sensibilities. In the early twenty-first century, we are still grappling with the spatial effects of early and high modern developments, and the contemporary crises revolving around political boundaries and geopolitical orders in many parts of the world have intensified spatial anxieties. They call for a sustained analysis of individual perceptions, cultural constructions and political implications of spatial processes, movements and relations.

The contributors of this book focus both on the spatial orders of modernity and on the various dynamic processes that have shaped our engagement with modern space. They creatively engage in a dialogue between literature, cinema, art history, geography, architecture, cultural semiotics and political science, and they transform twentieth- and twenty-first-century theory and philosophy to examine the textual forms of different spatial modernities. The chapters do not only engage with the cartographies, crossings and displacements represented within different texts and media, but are also attentive to the ways in which the latter produce space and perform mobility. Tracing an arc from Thomas Mores Utopia to the digital spatiality of contemporary autobiographical film, they treat texts as active cultural forces that crystallize, reinforce, interrogate or complicate the spatial imaginaries of modernity through their own narrative and poetic form.

Johannes Riquet is Associate Professor of English Literature at the University of Tampere. His research focuses on spatiality, the multiple relations between literature and geography, travel writing, phenomenology and film studies. He has published on island narratives, railway literature and cinema, the poetics of snow and ice, and Shakespeare.

Elizabeth Kollmann studied in Port Elizabeth and Zurich and completed her PhD in English Literature at the University of Zurich in 2014. Her research interests include life writing, exile, postcolonialism and South African literature. She is a Lecturer in English at the ZHAW Zurich University of Applied Sciences.

Routledge Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Literature

86 The Literature of Remembering
Tracing the Limits of Memoir
Edited by Bunty Avieson, Fiona Giles, and Sue Joseph

87 From Mind to Text
Continuities and Breaks Between Cognitive, Aesthetic and Textualist Approaches to Literature
Bartosz Stopel

88 Attachment, Place, and Otherness in Nineteenth-Century American Literature
New Materialist Representations
Jillmarie Murphy

89 Shame and Modern Writing
Edited by Barry Sheils and Julie Walsh

90 Provincializing the Bible
Faulkner and Postsecular American Literature
Norman W. Jones

91 Avant-Garde Pieties
Aesthetics, Race, and the Renewal of Innovative Poetics
Joel Bettridge

92 Modern Political Aesthetics from Romantic to Modernist Literature
Choreographies of Social Performance
Tudor Balinisteanu

93 Spatial Modernities
Geography, Narrative, Imaginaries
Edited by Johannes Riquet and Elizabeth Kollmann

For a full list of titles in this series, please visit www.routledge.com.

First published 2018
by Routledge
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2018 Taylor & Francis

The right of Johannes Riquet and Elizabeth Kollmann to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

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CIP data has been applied for.

ISBN: 978-1-138-30455-0 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-0-203-73004-1 (ebk)

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Our thanks go first and foremost to the participants of the conference Travelling Narratives: Modernity and the Spatial Imaginary, which took place in Zurich in 2013. The stimulating presentations and conversations we had at the conference prepared the ground for the writing of this book. We would also like to thank our former colleagues from the English Department at the University of Zurich for their support at different stages of the project. Special thanks go to the members of the research group Space/Phenomenology and Embodied Experience, among others, Martin Heusser, Ana Sobral, Rahel Rivera Godoy-Benesch, Michelle Dreiding, Stefanie Strebel, Martino Oleggini and Gabi Neuhaus. The many workshops and discussions with this group have been formative for our understanding of the poetics of space and the idea of spatial modernities. We would also like to thank Hanne Juntunen for her assistance in the final stages of the project. Finally, our thanks go to Jennifer Abbott and Veronica Haggar at Routledge for their support and guidance.

Tom Conley is the Abbott Lawrence Lowell Professor of Visual and Environmental Studies and of Romance Languages and Literatures at Harvard University. He studies relations of space and writing in literature, cartography and cinema. His work moves to and from early modern France and issues in theory and interpretation in visual media. His books include Film Hieroglyphs (1991, new edition 2006), The Graphic Unconscious in Early Modern Writing (1992), The Self-Made Map: Cartographic Writing in Early Modern France (1996, new edition 2010), Linconscient graphique: Essai sur lcriture de la Renaissance