Tag: Geography

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Review of Topophrenia: Place, Narrative and the Spatial Imagination by Robert T. Tally Jr.

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Cultural geographer Robert T. Tally Jr. publishes widely and frequently on many aspects of literary geographies, including the myriad forms of map-making. This book comprises his latest research and presents an excellent introduction to his work. Tally Jr. espouses the cartographic imperative: simply by being in the world, he argues, we map and reference our surroundings in an infinite variety of ways. Continue reading

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Walking Distance: Navigation, Epiphany, and Memory in American Small-Town Fiction

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The navigation of the physical small-town space triggers memories, emotions, and other physiological responses that help narrate and give shape to localised communities. The act of walking can be epiphanic and cathartic, it can geographise and shape the vast topography of American regions, and, in the texts concerned with small-town America, it becomes a vital signifier not simply of life, but of living. Continue reading

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After Katrina: Race, Neoliberalism, and the End of the American Century

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Over the last decade, Anna Hartnell has unofficially established herself as the UK’s leading academic on Hurricane Katrina. Her credentials include organizing a paired set of conferences in New Orleans and London on Katrina-related affairs, maintaining a Katrina-oriented blog, and writing multiple articles on visual/cinematic “Katrina texts”. Sadly, her full book-length study of Katrina falls short of its full potential. Continue reading

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University of Kent: Review: The Cartographic Imagination: Art, Literature and Mapping in the United States, 1945-1980

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Papers were impressively varied in reach and scope, covering landscape photography, the New York art scene, the refugee crisis, and maps of Disneyland. Though focused on the post-war period in the U.S., discussions, it seemed, could not help being drawn towards the present moment. Continue reading

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Book Review: The Boatman: Henry David Thoreau’s River Years by Robert M. Thorson

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Most biographers have ignored Henry David Thoreau’s relationship to the river but Robert Thorson here aims to correct this narrow focus by arguing that the river – the active ever-changing water bustiling with activity both human and natural – is as much a part of Thoreau’s canon and its landscape as the still water of Walden Pond. In this book Thorson envisions Thoreau’s environment as a hybrid of land and water, and the man as a boatman as much as a woodsman. Continue reading

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Review: Labor: Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas: “Food and Work in the Americas” edited by Susan Levine and Steve Striffler

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The essays in Labor seek to provide its readers with sustainable analysis of the unbreakable linkage of food and labor in different periods and locations of the Americas, thus successfully unveiling food as the crucial but often hidden aspect of production work. Continue reading

Sea Birds, Castaways, and Phantom Islands off Newfoundland

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On the twentieth of April 1534, Jacques Cartier sailed from St. Malo, France, with two ships and sixty-one men aboard each. On the tenth of May they came to Newfoundland at Cape Bonavista. On the twenty-first of May they sailed Northeast until they came upon an island encompassed by a jumble of broken ice which Cartier named l’Isle des Ouaisseaulx (Isle of Birds), as it’s surface was covered with nesting sea birds and the cries of thousands more filled the air overhead. Continue reading