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The diverse approaches to the Amazon collected in this book focus on stories of intimate, quotidian, interpersonal experiences (as opposed to those that take place between companies and nations) that, in turn, have resisted or else have been ignored by larger historical designs. This is why we propose a literary geography of the Amazon. In this space made out of historias, we will show the always already crafted, and hence political, ways in which this region has been represented in more “scientific”, often nationalizing histories. This includes, of course, understanding the “gigantic” discourses on Amazonia as rooted––if rarely discussed––in different quotidian, everyday experiences of a more intimate nature. The intimate interactions between one human being and another, or between men and animals, plants, or the natural space more generally as we see it, are not, as one might expect, comforting. Instead they are often disquieting, uncanny, or downright violent. This book argues that the Amazon’s “gigantism” lays not in its natural resources or opportunities for economic exploit, but in the richness that inhabits its archive of historias in the form of songs, oral histories, images, material culture, and texts.

This book belongs to a series called American Tropics: Towards a Literary Geography. Not a tightly defined geographical designation, American Tropics refers to a kind of extended Caribbean, including the south-eastern USA, the Atlantic littoral of Central America, the Caribbean islands, and north-eastern South America, with outposts even further afield. The development of the discipline of cultural geography has encouraged more sophisticated analyses of notions of space and place, which the series aims to bring to bear on its materials. The American Tropics conference held at Essex in July 2009 brought together nearly 100 scholars from all over the world. From the papers presented we selected twelve for development into essays which engage with the idea of literary geography central to this series and which represent—inasmuch as twelve essays can—the rich diversity of the writing produced within its geographical area. This volume therefore stands at an angle to the others in the series, offering a survey across the area, sampling twelve distinct places within it, from the outpost of New York in the north to Brazil in the south. It contains essays by Martha Jane Nadell, Maria del Pilar Blanco, Hsinya Huang, Gesa Mackenthun, Mimi Sheller, Susan Gillman, Alasdair Pettinger, Jak Peake, Russell McDougall, Neil L. Whitehead, Richard Price and Sally Price, and Nina Gerassi-Navarro.

This innovative book examines the development of modernism in four European cities: London, Paris, Berlin, and Vienna. Focusing upon how literary and cultural outsiders represented various spaces in these cities, it draws upon contemporary theories of affect, mood, and literary geography to offer an original account of the geographical emotions of modernism. It considers three broad features of urban modernism: the built environment of the particular cities, such as cafés or transport systems; the cultural institutions of publishing that underpinned the development of modernism in these locations; and the complex perceptions of writers and artists who were outsiders to the four cities. Particular attention is thus given to the transnational qualities of modernism by examining figures whose view of the cities considered is that of migrants, exiles, or strangers. The writers and artists discussed include Mulk Raj Anand, Gwendolyn Bennett, Bryher, Blaise Cendrars, Joseph Conrad, T. S. Eliot, Christopher Isherwood, Hope Mirlees, Noami Mitchison, Jean Rhys, Sam Selon, and Stephen Spender.