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Chapter 12 - Literary Mobilities and the Mobilisation of Space

from Part II - Developments

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 May 2025

Elizabeth Evans
Affiliation:
Wayne State University, Detroit
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Summary

This chapter brings into focus mobility as an avenue of spatial enquiry in literary and cultural studies. In recent decades the term ’mobility’ has become increasingly prominent within the spatial turn, coming to constitute a distinct area of study in literary and cultural scholarship, as well as across the humanities and social sciences more broadly. Conceptualisations of mobility have arisen from distinct yet increasingly interrelated disciplinary bases, including postcolonial scholarship, the new mobilities paradigm of social and cultural geography, and transport history. This chapter argues that mobilities scholarship and its attendant scholarship have been productive in advancing critical and theoretical understandings of space. Three key questions are addressed: what does it mean to talk about ’mobility’? How does mobility advance concepts of space? And where next for mobility? The chapter considers the emergence of mobilities scholarship across different fields of study, points of intersection and divergence between space and mobility as concepts, the role that literary and cultural studies have played in wider theoretical advances, and the current and future state of mobilities scholarship.

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Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2025

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References

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