Imagining Spaces and Places seeks to produce an interdisciplinary dialogue between art history and literature studies and other fields of cultural analysis that work with the concepts of space, place and various scapes, such as cityscapes, bodyscapes, mindscapes and memoryscapes, as well as the more familiar landscapes. The volume was inspired by new lines of study that underline the experiential and multi-dimensional aspects of spaces. We explore how art, literature or urban spaces forge scapes by imposing or suggesting aesthetic, evaluative or ideological orderings and perceptual as well as...

Why we read literature and why we should read literature are age-old questions that have, in recent years, gained unprecedented scope and intensity, against the backdrop of what has been perceived as a world-wide crisis in the humanities. While scholars frequently discuss different types of value separately, in this volume values of literature are approached in the plural: we argue that the ethical, aesthetic, cognitive, affective, social, historical, and existential values of literature should be explored in connection with each other. The three parts of the book explore the relationship...