French Literature Reviews - 2026
Space in All Its Letters
Literary Theory, Linguistics and Stylistics
JUST PUBLISHED (April 2003)
L'Espace en toutes lettres, edited by Rachel Bouvet and Basma El Omari, Nota bene Publishing, 2003.
$24.95 CAD.
Distributed in Canada by Gallimard ltée. In France by Librairie du Québec.
The primary objective of this collection of essays is to initiate a dialogue between geographers and literary scholars, establishing favorable conditions for an interdisciplinary exchange aimed at exploring the relationship with space and allowing two entirely different perspectives to intersect.
"L'Espace en toutes lettres": space as a real, physical place, also known as geographical; as a site of displacement and movement toward other horizons; as the crossing of boundaries through writing or reading. "Letters" in the plural, in order to approach the relationship with space from the angle of diversity and to imbue the collection with the momentum of travel. Since Quebec serves as the gathering place for all the authors who contributed to this volume, the journey unfolds from West to East, offering the reader a drift across the five continents.
Contents:
I POETICS OF SPACE
Marc Brousseau, Literary Space Between Geography and Criticism.
Véronique Cnockaert, A Garden of References: The Pardou.
Amaryll Chanady, The Spatialization of History in Narration.
Isaac Bazié, Cartography of an Inner Space: The Africas of Lopes.
Jean Morisset, Between Maieutics and Geopoetics, or the Trail of the Text-Earth.
Basma El Omari, The Geography of Absence, or Space in Palestinian Literature.
Eric Waddell, This World in Flux
II - THE TRAVEL NARRATIVE
André Carpentier, Writing Travel (Excerpts from *Mendiant de l'infini*).
Jean-François Gaudreau, Travel and Narrative, or the Return to the Imaginary: The Itineraries of Bruce Chatwin.
Hélène Guy, The Textual Absence of Peaks Exceeding 8,000 Meters.
Pierre Rajotte, Articulating Space in Travel Writing: Between the Substance and the Shadow.
III - TEXTS IN MOTION
Virginie Turcotte, A Voyage Toward the Creole Imaginary.
Josias Semujanga, Critical Perspectives and Novelistic Writing in Africa.
Rachel Bouvet, Cartography of the Distant: A Crossed Reading of Map and Text.
The relationship between geography and literature has long occupied scholars interested in how physical environments, borders, and displacement shape narrative forms. By bringing together literary critics and geographers, collaborative volumes in this field seek to examine the ways texts configure physical places, imaginary horizons, and cultural territories. This interdisciplinary approach allows researchers to compare the methods of geographical analysis with the textual strategies of creative writing, shedding light on how human movement and cartography are represented across different cultural traditions and geographical contexts.
Readers interested in the intersections of geography, travel writing, and contemporary literary theory may find this collection relevant to their studies. The primary objective of the collection is to initiate a dialogue between geographers and literary scholars, establishing favorable conditions for an interdisciplinary exchange aimed at exploring the relationship with space and allowing two entirely different perspectives to intersect. Since Quebec serves as the gathering place for all the authors who contributed to the volume, the journey unfolds from West to East.