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Chapter 20 - Sensory Geographies

from Part III - Applications and Extensions

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 May 2025

Elizabeth Evans
Affiliation:
Wayne State University, Detroit
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Summary

This chapter draws on a tradition of work on geographies of the sensory and the embodied to develop a reading of Tracy Chevalier’s novel The Last Runaway as a case study in sensory literary geography. It reads the text as both the story of a Quaker immigrant set in a fictional nineteenth-century Ohio and as the story of that setting embodied in the experiences of a fictional Quaker settler. The first half of the chapter provides a brief outline of the kind of literary geography practiced in this reading, emphasising in particular its interest in the inseparability of geographies, events, and characters as they function in the creation of fictional worlds. It highlights four aspects to this way of reading: first, its framing within the theory and practice of literary geography; second, its interest in the idea of ‘spatiality’; third, the idea that an understanding of spatiality as the spatial-social might prompt a rethinking of the narrative category of setting; and, finally, its grounding in work on embodied and sensory geographies. The second half of the chapter then explores in detail how Chevalier’s narrative style enables her to articulate the human geography of The Last Runaway through embodied human-scale sensory experiences.

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