human geographers would be bemused at the
traces of spatial science to be discerned in
Moretti’s (1998, 2005) spatialized apprehen-
sions of the European novel and literary
history.
Literature as a social and geographical phe-
nomenon, involving the geographical spread
of avowedly ‘literary’ forms (e.g. the novel),
the emergence of publication and printing
centres, literary celebrity and certain ideo-
logical effects, has been studied extensively.
Few such studies have been undertaken by
geographers, but the classic account of ‘the
coming of the book’ in Europe devoted a cen-
tral chapter to ‘the geography of the book’
(Febvre and Martin, 1984 [1958], pp. 167–
215), and historians and historical geograph-
ers followed in their footsteps to study the
diffusionof printing, the spread of literacy,
the spatial impress of censorship and other
topics. These historical treatments underscore
that both the forms and meanings of literature
have changed dramatically. Literature’s mean-
ing as a form of imaginative writing endorsed
by a critical establishment came about over
time (see Williams, 1977; Eagleton, 1983).
Its early meaning (into the eighteenth century)
was closer to the idea of literacy; that is, it was
the property or characteristic of learned, read-
ing elites. Literature’s meaning as a mark of
distinction regarding what one could do (read)
was then extended to what one read (books).
The question of what kinds of books counted
as literature then followed (Williams, 1977).
There was (and there remains) no easy distinc-
tion between fiction and fact as the way to
demarcate literature from other sorts of writ-
ing – witness the example of travel writing.
The difference between works of, say, philoso-
phy, history and politics as opposed to fic-
tional writing was codified in response to
industrial capitalism, which was seen as sup-
pressing creativity. This is not to say that lit-
erature, or more specifically what cultural
elites claimed counted as literature, escaped
an ideological function within industrial capit-
alism (Eagleton, 1983). Literature as creative
output was also caught up with the notion of a
‘national’ literature and the establishment
(and struggle over) nation-state based literary
canons. The formation of the literary canon
carried with it a new meaning: literature
exemplified for national critical establishments
the best of what a nation-state could achieve
and served the purposes of unifying national
identity (see alsonation;nationalism). (The
logic of specifically regional literatures and
regional literary canon formations runs in
parallel. But contrast these impulses towards
national and regional narratives of literary
formation with the recent identification of a
‘global literary space’ a` la world systems
theory: see Casanova, 2005.)
Yet the meanings of literature have in fact
remained multiple, or perhaps become mul-
tiple once again, albeit in different ways.
Most of what human geographers have had
to say about ‘literature’ has focused on the
book, specifically the novel or the travel nar-
rative, and yet many of the scholars on whose
work they draw have also had important things
to say about other cultural media:art, drama,
film,music, photography and video. Human
geographers have explored these too, but they
have displayed much less interest in literary
dramatic works (other than their staging: see
Chamberlain, 2001; Pratt and Johns, 2007)
except, by analogical extension, in ideas of
performance. This is surprising since, as
the image of Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre
reminds us, drama has long had important
things to show us about the production of
human geographies (cf. Gillies, 1994).
Printed work of many kinds continues to be
referred to as literature, whether this is the ‘lit-
erature’ produced by political campaigns, ad-
vertising literature, best-selling novels or, still,
literature-capital. Within the academy, ‘litera-
ture’alsomeansthecollective,published schol-
arly work pertaining to some field (‘the
geographical literature’), which typically has
its own (contested) canon and its own (conten-
tious) critical establishment. Literature as spe-
cifically scholarly work is not simply a product
found on the bookshelf or downloadable as a
PDF. It is a process that involves discernment,
vetting, peer review, editorial negotiation and
not a little politics. The scholarly literature is
thus not a thing: it is a social relation out of
which are wrought scholarly debate or consen-
sus, cases for tenure (or not), new journals or
lapsed subscriptions, expectations among re-
searchers and between teachers and students,
and struggles won or lost over thelingua franca
of scholarship as such.
A much less explored resonance between
geography and literature is the idea that
scholarly geographycan be literature in the
creative sense of the word (cf. Bunkse,
2004), though today’s human geography is
no stranger to experiments with literary form,
as in the work of Marcus Doel, Gunnar
Olsson or Allan Pred, for example, and there
are many other human geographers who
write with an ear to cadence and an eye to
image. But even ‘geographical literature’ inGregory / The Dictionary of Human Geography 9781405132879_4_L Final Proof page 421 31.3.2009 2:44pmLITERATURE