Rethinking Place through Literary Form

✍ Scribed by Rupsa Banerjee (editor), Nathaniel Cadle (editor)

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2022
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 294
• Series: Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

Rethinking Place Through Literary Form regards the relationship between place and linguistic form as challenging real and perceived configurations of place and renegotiating geopolitically determined categories of the ‘centre’ and ‘periphery’. The volume argues that the rise of scattered communities, displaced physically and psychologically by urban and alienated geographies, necessitates linguistic negotiations of one’s locatedness in place as the chief means of uncovering and re-building identity. By looking at narrative re-imaginings of forgotten and interrupted intimacies between habitation and place from diverse parts of the world, the twelve chapters address the growing need to expand and alter approaches to literary representations of modernity and modes of self-location. 

✦ Table of Contents

Foreword: Theorizing Place as World Polis and Multiple Form
Series Editor’s Preface
Praise for Rethinking Place through Literary Form
Contents
Notes on Contributors
Chapter 1: Introduction: The Interconnectedness of Place and Literary Form
Rethinking the Transnational
The Influence of Place on Form
Formal Reconfigurations of Place
Works Cited
Part I: The Influence of Place on Form: Literary Form and the Displacement of Locales
Chapter 2: Othered Places and the Bengali Leftist Female Bildungsroman: Sulekha Sanyal’s Nabankur and the Pre-Independence Communist Everyday
The Methodological Problems
Locating Nabankur
Critical Domestic Geography and the Crumbling Feudal Home
“Ghastly Spectacle” of the Famine: Contextualizing the Relief-Kitchen
The Relief Kitchen: Locus of Chhobi’s Political Labor
Works Cited
Chapter 3: Island of Words: The De-Realization of Place in the Writings of George Mackay Brown
Neolithic Writing
George Mackay Brown, Travellers
Magnus
Works Cited
Chapter 4: Locating Statelessness: The Multiple Forms of Anarchist Utopia in B. Traven’s The Death Ship
The Death Ship’s Critique of the Interchangeable State
Interlude among the Spanish Anarchists
The Open Sea as a Zone of Refuge
Works Cited
Part II: The Influence of Place on Form: Neighbourhoods, Homes and Remakings of Form
Chapter 5: “Earthquakes or Earthmovers”: Place Memory and Literary Counterspace in Helena María Viramontes’ Their Dogs Came with Them
Mexican American East L.A.
No one in the Eastside believed in paper
The neighbors itched like phantom limbs
Text as Barrio, Barrio as Text: Their Dogs Came with Them as Place Memory
Works Cited
Chapter 6: “A House with Many Rooms”: Transformed Homes in Dinaw Mengestu’s All Our Names
Roots and Rootlessness: A Tale of Two Continents
Dreaming Close to Home
Dashed Dreams, Reconfigured Realities
“A House with Many Rooms”
Works Cited
Part III: Formal Reconfigurations of Place: Regions, Nations, and Formal (Dis)junctions
Chapter 7: “Her Strong Roots Sink Down”: Displacement, Migration, and Form in Jean Toomer’s Cane
Migration and Meaning
Root Systems
Uproot Systems
Works Cited
Chapter 8: De-Provincializing Liolà: Pirandello, Futurism, and the Dialectics of Revision in Gramsci’s Cultural Writings
The Mobility of Liolà, Against the Sicilies Manufactured for Export
The Late Mattia Pascal: The Regularity of the Novel Form and the Contingency of Place
Liolà: The Language of the Play and the Paradoxes of Provincial Identity
The Dialectics of Luigi Pirandello
Works Cited
Chapter 9: “And No One Talks of National Rebirth”: Liberal Humanist Interventionism in the Post-Imperial Space of D.J. Enright’s Poetry
After MacArthur
“Repressed Dreams of Impossible Feudal Beauties”
Turning Away
Works Cited
Part IV: Formal Reconfigurations of Place: Discursive Cities and Transitory Worlds
Chapter 10: “No New Newark”: Rewriting Place through the Failed Form of Family Romance in Philip Roth’s The Anatomy Lesson
The Social Father’s Ur-Text
The Unwritten Maternal
Failing to Rewrite the Social Father’s Law
Writing the Body
Works Cited
Chapter 11: The Invisible City of the Creole Caribbean Takes Shape: A Discourse Between Italo Calvino and Édouard Glissant
Works Cited
Chapter 12: Locating the World in the Prose Poems of Peter Riley
“Voices Lost in the Falling Edge”
“/frustration and anger/a world emotion/”
“close bracket, close life, close episode”
“a stone turns/ a tone returns”
Works Cited
Index