"The Atlas of Literature" explores the fascinating connection between writers and place. This ambitious and exciting book focuses on writers and works that are intimately bound up with a place and a time, capturing a town, a city, a region, in its literary heyday.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Book Description
Editorial Reviews
From Booklist
A novel comes alive to the reader when he or she can relate to its landscape or themes. The Victorian world of Dickens and Austen, for example, becomes much clearer to a reader removed from it by 150 years through such excellent surveys as What Jane Austen Ate and Charles Dickens Knew (Simon & Schuster, 1993). Novelist and retired professor of American Studies Malcolm Bradbury has compiled a much more inclusive picture of the world of literature in The Atlas of Literature.
Drawing on the critical talents of fellow writers and academics, Bradbury looks at places in literature and how they affect and are affected by writers. The book is arranged in eight sections detailing various literary periods from the Middle Ages and the Renaissance to contemporary times. Each of these sections is divided into chapters that deal with locations such as France during the Enlightenment, London in the 1890s, or the world after the Wall. The chapter on Thomas Hardy's Wessex, for example, examines the area of southwest England in which the author set the majority of his novels, noting the corresponding real places and their significance to Hardy. The chapter on divided Ireland, on the other hand, discusses the influence of "the Troubles" in Northern Ireland on the writings of Seamus Heaney, Brian Friel, and others. The text is illustrated with 450 black-and-white photographs, drawings, and maps. The volume concludes with brief biographical notes about authors discussed, a list of sites around the world associated with famous authors that can be visited, a bibliography by country, and an index.
This is not an atlas in the conventional sense of the word but is a worthy addition to literature collections. It will be of interest to the beginner and the advanced scholar alike. It does not compare in scope or breadth to other standard literature reference tools, such as the Oxford Companion series, but covers the impact of place on literature and vice versa. Public and academic libraries will probably want to add this to the circulating collection. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Product Details
Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?
|
Customer Reviews
|
Share your thoughts with other customers:
|
||||||||||||||||||||||
|
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Of time and place on a map, real and imagined,
This review is from: The Atlas of Literature (Hardcover)
Hogwart's School? It's in England somewhere. Is it real or imagined? Jefferson, Mississippi, in Yoknapatawpha County. That one is real, right? Place names in literature. Some are so real as to defy the reality of their imagined creation. J.K. Rowling and William Faulkner set stories in time and places that are now mythic in purport. George Orwell simply chose real places to turn his anti-fascist sensibilities. There is nothing the least bit imagined about Aleksandr Solzenhitsyn's gulag prisons. Finding these places, real and imagined, on the map makes "The Atlas of Literature" a welcome addition to one's personal library. Editor Malcolm Bradbury worked four years with contributers in putting together this geographical history of literature beginning with the medieval period and concluding with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 when the world once again changed dramatically. I arbitrarily selected one writer to demonstrate what this atlas does. The chapter is called "James Fenimore Cooper's Frontier." One map depicts the "Acquisition of Indian Territory" and "Expansion of European Settlement," two topics that dominated Cooper's writing. One set of novels was concerned with Leatherstocking, who represented this western movement. Another map shows the settings of the five novels in the saga. Two paintings by N.C. Wyeth highlight two of the books. A painting by Romantic nature painter Thomas Cole depicts the "romantic vision of the dying wilderness...as the march of civilization prospered" (85). I turn from chapter to chapter trying to settle on one more section and think, How do I choose? It is ALL fascinating. I am looking at locations which influenced writers, locations writers influenced, places where they gathered to talk of life and love and their work--Paris, London, Harlem, Jerusalem. So I choose a place that readers may be least familiar with and invite them to taste the riches of the literature of this region, this place, this map. It is Nigeria. Chinua Achebe in "Things Fall Apart" writes of a changing Africa from tribalism to colonialism in early twentieth century. The first African to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, Wole Soyinka is renowned for his memoir, "Ake: The Years of Childhood." A younger Nigerian, Ben Okri, now an English citizen, won the Booker prize for "The Famished Road," a legend-based fantasy set in Nigeria. The maps and insets, photographs of the writers, covers of books, scenes from locales--all combine to provide a history of these places in literature. Contemporary Israeli writing, Andalusia's Arabic literature, the Canadian scene, Australia's literary map, a chapter on Broadway of the 1950's and 1960's (by the way, that is young Arthur Miller looking from behind Virginia Woolf on the cover of the Atlas), Post-war Italian fiction, German fiction, Existential Paris, the Spanish Civil War, Mark Twain's Mississippi, Oxford and Cambridge, Dante's Italy. I think you can see how diverse the content is. I would be remiss not to specifically mention South America and the Magic-Realists. But on the way, I pass Russia, India, Japan, Ireland, the Caribbean, ah, here we are: Latin America--a literary world all its own, rich in the writings of Octavio Paz, Alejo Carpentier, Gabriel Garcia Marquez (a must-read writer!!), Mario Vargas Llosa, Carlos Fuentes, Gabriela Mistral, Isabel Allende, and Julio Cortazar. If for nothing else, this Atlas can certainly guide your world-wide reading, if you accept this mission. Select a chapter any place in the world, perhaps a locale you know nothing of, find a writer, find a book, and begin a new journey. Let the maps, the atlas, be the guide to your destination: a new world of reading.
7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Excellent, informative, entertaining, one glaring omission.,
By Anthony Roberts (Bisbee, AZ USA) - See all my reviews
This review is from: The Atlas of Literature (Hardcover)
I found this book to be a wonderful addition to my library. It is truly a feast for lovers of literature. I have only one dissenting comment. Why the omission of Gore Vidal? With the inclusion of Norman Mailer, surely this omission is an oversight and not calculated. Overall, though, a marvelous book.
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
An A to Z Literature Guide,
By
This review is from: The Atlas of Literature (Hardcover)
An A to Z comprehensive guide through the long road of Literature.Almost everything about books and authors were covered in this atlas. From Austen to Zweig.Categorized into various notable sections.Namely,The Middle Ages and The Renaissance, The Age of Reason, The Romantics,The Age of Industrialism and Empire, The Age of Realism, The Modern World,After the 2nd World War and the World Today. Each part were comprehensively arranged and illustrated with famous examples and represented by the authors from that era. It covered almost all the important events and people in Literature. I enjoyed this atlas because each part was unique yet vitally contributed to the whole. It's handy to get all these Literary information compressed into a single book. It also gave a brief biographies of authors and showed their birthplace and journeys through their life and their famous works and contributions to the society. Well-done with great pictures and informative maps,notes,facts and figures. It showed the trends of Literary world and how it shaped our lives and affected our thoughts.
Share your thoughts with other customers: Create your own review
|
|
Tag this product(What's this?)Think of a tag as a keyword or label you consider is strongly related to this product.
Tags will help all customers organize and find favorite items. |
Sell a Digital Version of This Book in the Kindle Store
If you are a publisher or author and hold the digital rights to a book, you can sell a digital version of it in our Kindle Store.
Learn more
