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Article

Abstract

[First paragraph]

The articulation between literary text and space has been significantly redefined thanks to two major theoretical turns. Because of the spatial turn that marked the humanities and social sciences from the 1980s onwards, time - inherited from the Enlightenment's ideal of progress - is not the main category of analysis any longer: space has replaced it (Soja, 1989). The spatial dimension of objects is now at the core of critical and analytical preoccupations: all fields of knowledge (and not only geography) are now invited to reconsider space, places and mapping. Literary studies reflect this paradigmatic shift as can be seen in the increased usage of spatial vocabulary in critical texts to decipher the way narratives are built. As a parallel to this epistemological revolution, the beginning of the 1980s saw a cultural turn which questionned the positivist approach by focusing on culture, i.e. circumstances which constitute the specificity of human beings. All disciplines have been suggested to take into account representations and discourses: texts, including literary ones as those of Swift and Carroll, have become a legitimate object for both the social sciences and geography. The spatial and cultural turns have thus caused a deep transformation of the academic landscape: objects themselves receive more attention than disciplinary methods. Current gender, urban or cultural studies departments exemplify these changes in theoretical approach as they gather researchers coming from literature, history, anthropology, to name several examples. As encapsulated in the following quotation by Robert T. Tally Jr., "literary cartography, literary geography, and geocriticism enable productive ways of thinking about the issues of space, place, and mapping after the spatial turn in literary and cultural studies" (Tally, 2013: 3). The spatial dimension of literary narratives has become an autonomous field of research, at the junction of literature and geography. That said, this field is comprised of a number of various approaches determined by the disciplinary background of those who explore it: even if they work on the same object, literary critics and geographers differ in their methods. The former focus on the poetic dimension of space while the latter question the spatiality of narratives.

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