'As the spatial turn gathers momentum within literary studies, Geocritical Explorations offers a splendid snapshot of current work, featuring thirteen essays that range across the world, attentive to nuances of text and place, but also advancing theoretical reflection about approaches to literary geography. This book will certainly help put geocriticism firmly on the contemporary map.' Peter Hulme, Professor, University of ... Read moreEssex, UK Geocritical Explorations is the necessary companion volume to Bertrand Westphal's Geocriticism, as well as a notable contribution in its own right to our understanding of the spatial turn in contemporary literary criticism. Taking Westphal's theorization of 'geocriticism' as their point of departure, the authors of the essays collected here offer provocative reflections on the theory and practice of putting 'place' at the center of our thinking about literature. Ranging across the cartography, ecology, insularity, frontiers, topography, and many other aspects of places on five different continents as figured in fiction and nonfiction, poetry and prose, the essays in this volume demonstrate that place is never a simple matter, just a neglected one. They teach us fruitful ways to attend to place in literature, and thereby to recover its role in the making of our world. - Ricardo Padron, Associate Professor of Spanish, University of Virginia, USA, and author of The Spacious Word: Cartography, Literature, and Empire in Early Modern Spain Show Less