PLACE AND LITERATURE is a virtual library and discussion forum for the study of place and literature and the connections between them. It's about how we experience places, how places influence writers, and how literary works shape our awareness and understanding of places. The subject encompasses the ways places are defined, created, and changed, and the ways they are represented in literature—the setting of a novel, the sites in a travelogue, the environment in a nature essay.  It also includes topics like regional and national literatures, mapping in literary history, literary geography, and the relationship between literary theory and critical theory in fields like architecture, geography, and anthropology.

The subject is very broad and interdisciplinary, and there's a vast and every-growing bibliography of books, articles, and websites. PLACE AND LITERATURE joins a list of several other sites (notably Research on Place and Space and the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment) intended to help students, teachers, literary critics, historians, geographers, architects, anthropologists, landscape historians, writers, and artists in their studies of the many ways literature and place come together.

Your comments and suggestions are welcome. Please email the site administrator, Prof. Steve Hutkins, at the Gallatin School of New York University by using the “contact” link.