‘Habits of a landscape’: the Geocritical Imagination in Robert Macfarlane’s The Wild Places and The Old Ways

Abstract

The emergence of geocriticism in recent years has given new impetus to the study of place-writing in fiction, and this essay aims to show that it has great potential for travel writing studies. Unlike the single-issue politics of eco-criticism, geocriticism calls for a broad recontextualization of place as the nexus of sustainable and inclusive communities.¹ As defined by Bertrand Westphal,² geocriticism takes its conceptual lead from the ‘spatial turn’ of the 1980s,³ but the emphasis now is on place-centred criticism rather than on mapping the subject in an era of globalization. The centrality of place and its several functions in literature are examined in Westphal’s account through examples ranging from the pre-modern, speculative fictions of Homer and Dante to the postmodern geographical metafictions of Italo Calvino and Umberto Eco. His aim is to organize histories of places through their continuing multi-perspectival representations in literature.