Of all European cities, Americans today are perhaps most curious about Berlin, whose position in the American imagination is an essential component of nineteenth-century, postwar and contemporary transatlantic imagology. Over various periods, Berlin has been a tenuous space for American claims to cultural heritage and to real geographic space in Europe, symbolizing the ultimate evil and the power of redemption. This volume offers a comprehensive examination of the city's image in American literature from 1840 to the present. Tracing both a history of Berlin and of American culture through the...

English Topographies in Literature and Culture takes a spatial approach to the study of English culture. In order to gain a fresh perspective on constructions of English cultural identity, the collection treats geography, social spaces and spatial practices as well as representations of space and place as complex constellations termed 'cultural topographies'. Individual contributions focus on writing landscapes, London psychogeography, heritage discourses, urban planning, and idiosyncratic spatial practices such as suburban gardening. In line with the 'affective turn', the...

London post-2010 in British Literature and Culture explores cultural and literary representations of London since around 2010 and focuses on a period in which a string of celebratory national and global media events, but also riots and anti-capitalist protests have cemented London's status as a paradigmatic world city. This collection of articles brings together a wide variety of topics, such as the 2011 London riots, the London Olympics of 2012, royal festivities, the Tube anniversary, memorials, and London in recent novels and blockbuster films. The contributions look at the way in...

Writing London and the Thames Estuary is an ambitious study of place and identity which resonates deeply against the troubled politics of contemporaneity. Drawing on a broad range of cultural materials including novels, film, theatre, tourist literature, topography, chorology and sociological writing, Len Platt traces the making of the estuary as margin by a metropolis that has been dependant on this region, sometimes for its very survival. Drawing on writers and artists ranging from Middleton, Defoe, Pepys, Dickens, Conrad and T. S Eliot through to such contemporary figures as Iain...

The essays collected in this volume unfold a panorama of urban phenomena of resistance that reach from the seventeenth to the twenty-first centuries, thus revealing the essential vulnerability of urban space to all forms of subversion. Taking their readers to diverse places and moments in history, the contributions remind us of the struggles over the concrete as well as the imaginary space we call the city. The collection maps the various challenges experienced by urban communities, ranging from the unmistakably hegemonic claim of civic festivities in early modern London to the perceived...

Picturing America: Photography and the Sense of Place argues that photography is a prevalent practice of making American places. Its collected essays epitomize not only how pictures situate us in a specific place, but also how they create a sense of such mutable place-worlds. Understanding photographs as prime sites of knowledge production and advocates of socio-political transformations, a transnational set of scholars reveals how images enact both our perception and conception of American environments. They investigate the power photography yields in shaping our ideas of self, nation, and...

Winner of the 2020 “Outstanding Academic Title” Award, created by Choice Magazine. In Negotiating Space in Latin America, edited by Patricia Vilches, contributors approach spatial practices from multidisciplinary angles. Drawing on cultural studies, film studies, gender studies, geography, history, literary studies, sociology, tourism, and current events, the volume advances innovative conceptualizations on spatiality and treats subjects that range from nineteenth century-nation formation to twenty-first century social movements. Latin America has endured multiple spatial...

In Artistic Reconfigurations of Rome Kaspar Thormod examines how visions of Rome manifest themselves in artworks produced by international artists who have stayed at the city’s foreign academies. Structured as an alternative guide to Rome, the book represents an interdisciplinary approach to creating a dynamic visual history that brings into view facets of the city’s diverse contemporary character. Thormod demonstrates that when artists successfully reconfigure Rome they provide us with visions that, being anchored in a present, undermine the connotations of permanence and immovability...

Timescapes of Waiting explores the intersections of temporality and space by examining various manifestations of spatial (im-)mobility. The individual articles approach these spaces from a variety of academic perspectives – including the realms of history, architecture, law and literary and cultural studies – in order to probe the fluid relationships between power, time and space. The contributors offer discussion and analysis of waiting spaces like ante-chambers, prisons, hospitals, and refugee camps, and also of more elusive spaces such as communities and nation-states. ...

This collection emphasizes a cross-disciplinary approach to the relevance of borders and bordering as a spatial paradigm in Anglophone studies. It sets out to provide a critical counter-narrative to the 1990s globalization argument of a “borderless” world by insisting on the significant roles borders play. The essays range in subject matter from geography, history, British and American literature to painting and Reggae music and map out different conceptualisations of the border: place, line, process, contact zones, etc. The volume’s cross-border “narrative” serves as a point of...