From a Poetics of Space to a Politics of Place: The Topographical Turn in Literary Studies
From a Poetics of Space to a Politics of Place: The Topographical Turn in Literary Studies

Summary/Abstract: The article’s subject is a topographical turn in literary research, considered in association with the spatial turn in humanities. It in particular concerns contemporary reconfigurations, both in the area of new concepts of space and the discipline itself which is open today for circulation of ideas and notions from other areas. The essay indicates the main directions of interest of the research current in question, including e.g.: new regionalism; ecocriticism; literary urban studies; relations between literary representations of space and individual/collective identity; interrelations between literature and geography. Characterised are the basic determinants of new concepts of space, e.g. connecting spatiality with temporality, reinstated category of site, interest in hybrid(ic)/transitive spaces and heterotopias, and the fundamental shift in the perspective – from a poetics of space to one of site.

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