Representation of Place in Literature and Culture: Global Perspectives

deadline for submissions: 
September 15, 2024
full name / name of organization: 
Prof. (Dr.) Indranil Acharya, Dr. Ujjwal Kr. Panda et al. (eds.)

Representation of Place in Literature and Culture: Global Perspectives

(An Edited Book-Volume)

 

Concept Note

Matters of space, spatiality, geography, topography and place have mostly remained neglected in modern scholarship and teaching because in most modern and postmodern literary criticism history and temporality have been dominating discourses. But in recent criticism the "when" and "what" of literature yield place to "where" as Michel Foucault declared the present time as "the epoch of space" (22). Literature reflects a spirit of place and a sense of place because the place is known and gives meaning when it is felt and closely experienced by human beings living in it. In the Preface of his famous book, Place and Placelessness (1976) Edward Relph criticises the modern environmental discussions which generalize and, resultantly, simplify the landscape in terms of some stereotypical and mechanical structures or models and subsequently "ignore much of the subtlety and significance of everyday experience". Bertrand Westphal who has been instrumental in introducing the concept of Geocriticism in literary theory remarks in his book, Geocriticism: Real and Fictional Places (2011) that a “geocentered” approach to literature and culture allows a particular place to serve as the focal point for a variety of critical practices. Again, as Robert T. Tally Jr. who translated Westphal’s seminal book in English, writes in his Translator’s Preface –

After all, a place is only a place because of how we, individually and collectively, organize space in such a way as to mark the topos as special, to set it apart from the spaces surrounding it and infuse it. Our understanding of a particular place is determined by our personal experiences with it, but also by our reading about others’ experiences. (x)

The present book aims to address these geographical-cultural specificities of places and at the same time, it attempts to look at literature as a spatially symbolic act referring to a plethora of human experiences attached to a place. Most importantly, in the age of globalization where a pro-capitalist search for a homogeneous culture seeks to debunk cultural differences it aims to address the marginal experiences of place as reflected in literature coming from various indigenous, marginalized and displaced groups across the continents. The book also aims to reflect on different cultural signposts and environmental issues which have been invariably attuned with spatial experiences in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.

 

Plan of the Book: 

We have planned to arrange the essays/articles/ chapters under five major cluster heads:

•       Theory on Place, Space and Spatiality (General Section)

•       American Context

•       African Context

•       Australian Context 

•       Asian Context 

 

Guidelines: 

Proposals/Abstracts for essays within 300 words and a short bio are to be submitted by the 15th of September 2024, with complete articles within 5,000-7,000 words (excluding works cited and endnotes), expected by the 15th of November 2024, on topics including, but not limited to, the following:

  • Place and literary theory 
  • Place, myth and culture
  • Place and the making of ‘new canon’
  • Place in indigenous literature, culture and aboriginal studies
  • Place and area studies
  • Place, dystopianism and ecodisaster
  • Place and popular culture
  • Place in film and media narratives
  • Place, border narratives and diaspora studies

We welcome essays/ articles/papers/chapters following the MLA Handbook’s 8th edition in this proposed edited book-volume on Representation of Place in Literature and Culture: Global Perspectives to be published by a major international academic publisher. Submissions of abstracts, complete essays/ articles/papers/chapters and queries are to be directed to acharya.indranil@gmail.com  or biju.ujjwal@gmail.com.

 

Thank you,

Prof. (Dr.) Indranil Acharya, Dr. Ujjwal Kr. Panda et al. (eds.)