Literary geographies of modernism

Surveying a wide range of recent critical work on space, place, and geography in Anglophone literary modernism, this chapter illustrates the variety of geographical imaginations that modernist texts disclose to their readers. Moreover, many modernist texts produce their own distinctive forms of geographical thought and knowledge. Consequently, the chapter begins by considering several ways in which geography is, however fleetingly, thematised in modernist writing, either as a problem or as a source of creative fascination. In the sections that follow, the chapter considers in turn modernism's longstanding, deeply ambivalent association with the city; the significance of exile, migrancy, and travel for modernist texts; modernism's implication in projects of imperialism and decolonisation; and the significance of local or regional places for many modernist texts. Throughout, the purpose is to offer an appropriately complex account of where modernism happened, and how place, space, and geography are central to its aesthetic practices.