Some writers are forever associated with a particular place: Dickens and London, the Brontes and Yorkshire, Hawthorne and New England, Twain and the Mississippi, Joyce and Dublin, Hemingway and Paris, Faulkner and the South. This association of writer and place is but one of the many ways literature and geography connect. This course will examine some of these connections as it scopes out the field of “literary geography.” It will consider such questions as: How are writers shaped by where they grew up and where they live? What are the techniques writers use to represent places in literature, and how do these representations teach us to see and experience places in new ways? What are the problems in labeling literary works in terms of “regional” and “national” literatures? How do spatial relations like “east and west” and “north and south” become so loaded with meaning? How can mapping be a useful tool of literary analysis? How do the insights of fields like human geography help us understand literature, and how can literary works be useful to geographers? The course will involve work with the instructor’s website (www.placeandliterature.com), such as keeping a blog and doing research in electronic sources. Readings will include fiction and nonfiction that focus on particular settings, landscapes, cities, regions, and countries, such as Twain’s Life on the Mississippi, Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast, Wallace Stegner’s The Spectator Bird, Annie Dillard’s An American Childhood, Frederic Prokotsch’s The Asiatics, Jamaica Kincaid’s A Small Place, Terry Tempest Williams’ Refuge, Jill Ker Conway’s The Road from Coorain, as well as articles in landscape studies and human geography.