This module offers an introduction to understanding and exploring ideas of space, movement and identity in relation to major writers and texts across the nineteenth century with a particular interest in reading and mapping. What can and cannot be mapped? What resists or exceeds acts of mapping? We will read key writers of place alongside a range of relevant spatial and philosophical texts and extracts for each of the thematic themes that are addressed across the module. As the title suggests the course is particularly interested in the challenges involved in moving across and between direct physical and embodied experiences and the representation of place in different literary forms.
The module focuses on three themes: walking and writing; mapping literary place and space; and interior and exterior spaces. We will use these themes to think about how place and space are constructed through movement, action and reaction, as well as to consider how the visual representation of place through literary maps bears upon verbal description within a text.