Materialist hermeneutics, textuality and the history of geography: print spaces in British geography, c.1500–1900

Literary geography: reforging the connections

“…The knowledge that was articulated was important, but the way it was structurally articulated was equally so, for it revealed much about the social relations of its production and consumption. This is clearly demonstrated in Mayhew's (1999) analysis of Samuel Johnson's Rasselas. In a tale suffused by a High Anglicanism which counterpoints the choice of life with the choice of eternity, the writing is structured by a hierarchy of concerns that move from the sensual through the intellectual to the spiritual.…”

Geographies of the Book: Review and Prospect

“…So intrinsic is the relationship between writing and thinking geographically that it has been argued that, “Geography begins only when geographers begin writing it” (Wooldridge & East , p. 171). The relationship between geography and its inscriptions—whether in the form of maps, globes, gazetteers, dictionaries, travel narratives or textbooks, among much else—is both significant and complex: geography's epistemic cultures have generated a considerable variety of textual traditions that have been subject to recent scrutiny (Barnes ; della Dora ; Mayhew ; Ogborn , , ; Roche ; Withers ). The hybrid nature of geography is mirrored by the hybrid nature of its texts.…”

Postcolonial Imaginations: Approaching a “Fictionable” World through the Novels of Maryse Condé and Wilson Harris

“…The first of these understands texts, including literary works, not only as repositories of cultural meaning but also as material objects that inhabit place and circulate in space. Self-reflexively, many studies deal with the historical spatialities of geographical writing, focusing not only on the content and production of geographical texts (Withers 2006) but also on the changing textual layout and format of the "print spaces" of geography books (Mayhew 2007), as well as the "locational particularity" of the ways in which key geographical works were read and distributed (Keighren 2006, 525). This focus on the spatiality of production, textuality, and reception goes well beyond the "facile" observation that textual encounters must inevitably take place somewhere (Livingstone 2005b, 100), toward the important geographical point of the significance of spatial location and distribution for processes of interpretation and meaning-making.…”