Developing a discussion initiated in the recently-published Literary Geographies 6(1), the journal’s editors seek contributions to an expanded ‘Thinking Space’ section on ‘Literary Geographies in Isolation’ planned for the December issue. We are interested in receiving shorter submissions of 1500-3000 words, including the more personal, polemical or impressionistic. Topics might include, but are not limited to:

• armchair tourism in lockdown

• reading as virtual fieldwork

• literary landscapes and mental health

• landscape, loneliness and the literary persona

• flâneurie and the evacuated city

• digital literary geographies

• teaching literary geographies online

• literary geographers collaborating across distances

• virtual reading communities

• life without bookshops

• re-reading fiction 

• reading with children at home

• teaching geography using stories

• challenges facing early career literary geographers

• book promotion / literary events in a time of social distancing

• literary geography and disease: for instance, Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year (1722), Dorothy Wordsworth’s ‘Thoughts on My Sick Bed’ (1832):

No prisoner in this lonely room,

I saw the green Banks of the Wye,

Recalling thy prophetic words,

Bard, Brother, Friend from infancy!

No need of motion, or of strength,

Or even the breathing air;

--I thought of Nature’s loveliest scenes;

And with Memory I was there.

Please submit articles of approximately 1500-3000 words by September 7th. Enquiries from authors wanting to discuss their ideas are welcomed by the editors. Please email us at editors@literarygeographies.net.