Relational Literary Geographies: Co-producing Page and Place

This themed section of Literary Geographies emerged from a Social and Cultural Geography group sponsored session at the 2014 Royal Geographical Society (including the Institute of British Geographers) Annual Conference. The session invited papers that investigated the ways in which geographies of fiction co-produce the real and imagined places around us. It invited scholars to explore the complex relations which produce the ‘geography of fiction’ (Piatti & Hurni 2011:218), specifically the ways through which page and place are co-produced in reading and writing practice. In using the term ‘geography of fiction’, Barbara Piatti and Lorenz Hurni write in the tradition of Franco Moretti (1998); they are interested in how we cartographically produce the imagined world of fictional texts. Here we use ‘geography of fiction’ to initiate a different journey into the fields of literary geography and literary studies. Our journey is less concerned with cartographically rendering the fictional world and more interested in examining how the real and imagined come together and move apart. Put another way, our approach focuses on how lived geographies seep into imagined ones and how imagined ones spill beyond the confines of the page. Thus, at the heart of these papers is a concern with relational thinking, with thinking about literary space as something made through connections that happen within, before, beyond and across the text.