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4 Guerrilla geography: describing and defending place for a living (or the renaissance of 100–mile geographers) Briony Penn I n 1969, the bicentenary of the geographer and naturalist Alexander von Humboldt slipped by largely unnoticed in North America. Given his contributions to the study of the earth, it was a surprising descent into relative obscurity. A medical researcher writing in to the Journal of the American Medical Association had expressed his dismay that Humboldt was ‘no longer accorded the recognition he enjoyed during his lifetime’ (Frankel, 1964
3 Gothic geographies: the cartographic consciousness of Irish gothic fiction Theodore Melville's The White Knight, or the monastery of Morne (1802) provides both a useful instance of the convergence of regional, national, and gothic literary forms considered in Chapter 2 and a helpful starting point with which to discuss the geographic settings of Romantic-era Irish gothic literature. Published just two years after Castle Rackrent (1800), The White Knight presents itself as a quasi-historical account of Irish antiquity and is set
This study brings emergent methodologies of literary geography to bear upon the unique contents—or more to the point, the moving, artful, frequently audacious contents—of a codex known as London, British Library MS Harley 2253. The Harley manuscript was produced in provincial Herefordshire, in England’s Welsh Marches, by a scribe whose literary generation was wiped out in the Black Death of 1348–1351. It contains a diverse set of writings: love-lyrics and devotional texts, political songs and fabliaux, saints’ lives, courtesy literature, bible narratives, travelogues, and more. These works alternate between languages (Middle English, Anglo-Norman, and Latin), but have been placed in mutually illuminating conversation. Following an Introduction that explores how this fragmentary miscellany keeps being sutured into ‘whole’-ness by commentary upon it, individual chapters examine different genres, topics, and social groupings. Readers from literary history, medieval studies, cultural geography, gender studies, Jewish studies, book history, and more, will profit from the encounter.
Harley 2253 is famous as medieval books go, thanks to its celebrated roster of lyrics, fabliaux, and political songs, and owing to the scarcity of material extant from this ‘in-between’ period in insular literary history. England’s post-Conquest/pre-plague era remains dimly known. Despite such potential, there has never been a monograph published on Harley 2253. Harley Manuscript Geographies orients readers to this compelling material by describing the phenomenon of the medieval miscellany in textual and codicological terms. But another task it performs is to lay out grounds for approaching this compilation via the interpretive lens that cultural geography provides.
Of all the sciences, geography finds its origin in action. 1 In the nineteenth century, geographical knowledge-making came to be increasingly defined by large-scale movements of exploration: the practical act of moving across unknown and distant spaces. The ‘explorer’ emerged as the missionary of this purportedly robust and manly science, travelling to extend the frontiers of European knowledge. As the century progressed, the ‘unexplored’ spaces on maps were rapidly colonised with the lines of expeditionary routes taken and the names of the explorers
As the previous chapters suggest, one way to understand how history is confronted in public art, memorials and urbanistic projects today is to follow the conceptualization of site not just down to the ground, but also “upward” through the various channels of mediation, familial and local as well as global and distributed. This in turn confronts us not just with questions of the authentic and the replicated, the digital and the real, but with the wider geographic framework in which every site participates
focalising consciousness in Home – and her decision to remain in her father's house at the end of the novel as evidence of a ‘disturbing gender politics’ (Phillips 169; Tanner 36). Tanner reads the novel's geography as ultimately ‘uncomfortable’ for both character and readers and as problematically ‘circumscribed’ for female protagonist Glory (35, 37) . I argue that Robinson's tropes of the house/home are more metaphorically spacious and symbolically resonant than these critics have found, especially when viewed as spaces for the ritual enactment of grief
the presence of women in public space. Priscilla Ferguson’s notion of a ‘moral geography’ that connects urban mobility and transgression, a term she introduces to analyse Zola’s La Curée , helps us understand how omnibus literature addressed women’s participation in modern urban life. 8 In the context of this literature, ‘moral geography’ describes how cultural production of the time conceived of the omnibus as a space of female sexual transgression, even if women’s presence on public transport was endorsed in practice. Scholarly debates about the place of women
Geography defines the limits of the possible. Geographical structures underlie many of the enduring patterns of military activity – the traditional routes of invasion, the length of the campaigning season and the siting of defensive works which were often built and rebuilt over a period of centuries on the same commanding ground. The favoured tactical methods of any pre
Chapter 4 The geography of hospital contributory schemes: membership, reciprocity and integration If mass contribution was to save the voluntary system, as its advocates had hoped, then a key question was whether it could do so everywhere, or whether it would simply reinforce variations in the resources available to the hospitals. And in an era when the populace was becoming accustomed to the ‘hospital habit’, to what extent did membership of a scheme ensure that contributors could obtain treatment without having to undergo enquiries as to their means at all
This article traces what Élie Faure believed to be the racial, ethnic and geographic origins of art. Influenced by the writings of Gobineau and Taine, he asserts that the taxonomisation of species provides a model for the taxonomisation of artistic productions. The mixing of various races is evidenced in their artistic production, with the relative presence or absence of the rhythmic serving as an index for the presence or absence of certain types of blood, or racial/ethnic origins. Similarly, the qualities of the land where art is produced results in visible effects upon the (artistic) forms created by the people living in that geographic area. Métissage is considered a positive characteristic, and cinema the apogee of modern artistic production because of its integration of machine rhythms into the rhythms of human gesture.