Literature in the sense of imaginative writ-
ing has attracted the analytical attention of
cultural geographers over the past 30 years in
particular. Novels, stories, poems and travel
narratives have been studied for their repre-
sentations of places, landscapes and nature, of
regions and nations, and of geographical pro-
cesses such as urbanization, migration and
colonization. An interest in literature was evi-
dent in some of Alexander von Humboldt’s
writings, and received scattered attention at
moments through the early and mid-twentieth
century. Darby’s essay on the regional geog-
raphy of Hardy’s Wessex (1948) was an early
outlier, but it extracted the descriptions of
landscapefrom the novels and used them to
reconstruct the regional geographies of Dorset
in the first half of the nineteenth century: as
Darby had it, placing ‘the pictures that Hardy
drew’ in ‘the sequence that stretches from
John Coker’s survey in the seventeenth cen-
tury up to modern accounts of the land util-
ization of Dorset’ (p. 343). Darby displayed
no interest in exploring the significance of
these places for the characters and events in
the novels, still less in approaching these
‘geographies’ with the sensibility of a literary
scholar (cf. Barrell, 1982). Hardy’s texts were
read as more or less inert sources, and Darby
had no interest in (or awareness of) how, as
Brosseau (1995, p. 89) later put it more gen-
erally, a novel ‘has a particular way of writing
its own geography.’
It was not until thirty years after Darby’s
essay that literature received any sustained and
systematic attention inhuman geography,as
part of the growing attention to environmental
perception, imagery, attitudes and values, and
to consciousness as an aspect of culture. This
was the product of the critique ofspatial sci-
enceand the flowering of ahumanistic geog-
raphythat renewed the discipline’s traditional
connections with thehumanitiesin different,
more analytical, registers, and which had a
particular impact on cultural geography
(Salter and Lloyd, 1977; Pocock, 1981).
These explorations intensified through the
closing decades of the twentieth century and
into the opening decades of the twenty-first.
This was achieved, in part, through a much
closer and usually theoretically informed en-
gagement with the work of literary scholars
and cultural critics – from Walter Benjamin
and Mikhail Bakhtin through Edward Said
and Raymond Williams to Terry Eagleton
and Fredric Jameson – many of whom had
an interest inspatialityand the cultures of
colonialism,capitalismandmodernitythat
was at once close to and consequential for
human geography more generally. Their crit-
ical writings had a considerable impact on
explorations ofmodernismandpostmodern-
ismin the cities of the global North, ofim-
aginative geographiesproduced under the
signs oforientalism,tropicalityand similar
projects, and on theorizations ofpowerand
culture. These endeavours were reinforced
through a second source of interest in literary
matters: human geography’s engagement with
styles of contemporaryphilosophythat Rorty
once described as forms of cultural criticism:
these included his own version of pragma-
tismbut alsopost-structuralism(the lit-
erary sensibilites of Foucault and Derrida
are especially salient, though Eagleton has
railed against Spivak’s).
The turn to literature has raised an interest-
ing question in a field dominated by the dis-
courses of social science: Exactly what kind of
evidence is literature? For some human geog-
raphers, it is both indicative of the capacity of
human beings to make meaning and an
expression of a specific meaning-filled culture
(e.g. Bunkse, 2004); for others, and not
mutually exclusive of other meanings, it is at
once a reflection of political–economic real-
ities and a way of thinking them through (e.g.
Henderson, 1999); for others, it is part and
parcel of the production of regional identity
and memory (e.g. DeLyser, 2005). In human
geography, the meaning of ‘imaginative writ-
ing’ extends to some degree to narratives of
travel and exploration (seetravel writing).
While not pure figments of imagination, these
writings are often structured around certain
tropes and narrative conventions that give
textualityassuchaconstitutive role in their
making: travel narratives do not simply mirror
or correspond to the world (e.g. Blunt, 1994).
It is probably safe to say that most contempor-
ary geographical study of literature is not so
much interested in literatureper sethan in
literature as a species ofrepresentation,dis-
courseandtext, interest in which has grown
with thecultural turnin the social sciences
(Barnes and Duncan, 1991). It is not entirely a
one-way street, and the traffic has been
marked by both interesting departures and
juddering collisions: literary scholars would
have no difficulty in recognizing the force
and originality of Kearns’ (2006b) reading of
the spatial dialectics of James Joyce, for
example, and the three spatial motifs he iden-
tifies (circulation, labyrinth and palimpsest)
thread out on to the wider terrain of British
colonialism and Irish nationalism; but mostGregory / The Dictionary of Human Geography 9781405132879_4_L Final Proof page 420 31.3.2009 2:44pmLITERATURE