The Geocritical Legacies of Edward W. Said

“The focus of Tally’s The Geocritical Legacies of Edward W. Said is how Said’s work can function as a prism via which Geo-political and cultural ‘spaces’ may be critically explored. It gives this collection its particular originality amid the many books about ‘the spatial turn’ and also in Said studies generally these days since it is the tenth anniversary of his death. As one generation of critics retires, and a new one is ushered in during a time when the future of the humanities is uncertain, this collection is a welcome reminder of what the best criticism can do in and for the world.”

– Daniel T. O’Hara, Professor of English and Inaugural Mellon Professor of Humanities, Temple University, USA

“Edward W. Said pioneered the postcolonial momentum that would replace a global concept of historical time that privileged the West by a geographical perspective, which has enabled the non-Western victims of this imperial Western concept of historical time to become visible on a global scale. The essays in Robert Tally’s edited volume The Geocritical Legacies of Edward W. Said constitute welcomed contributions to this urgent Saidian initiative.”

– William V. Spanos, Distinguished Professor of English, Binghamton University, USA

“The Geocritical Legacies of Edward W. Said should become a resource for those thinking about a host of interlocking questions Said explored over his career: cosmopolitanism, secular criticism, exile and modernism, critical and political genealogies, democratic humanism, imperialism, nationalism, and narration, as well as the various configurations of Orientalism. Said serves as point of departure: these essays extend his work in thoughtful and provocative ways.”

– Susan Z. Andrade, Associate Professor of English, University of Pittsburgh, USA

Biography

Robert T. Tally Jr. teaches American and world literature at Texas State University. His research and teaching focuses on the relations among space, narrative, and representation, particularly in U.S. and comparative literature, and he is active in the emerging fields of geocriticism, literary geography, and the spatial humanities. Tally is the editor of “Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies,” a Palgrave Macmillan book series, and he has published several books, as well as dozens of essays and reviews, on literature, theory, and criticism.

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