Lands of Desire and Loss develops an interdisciplinary approach connecting the literary and geographical imagination which shape British perception and representation of colonial and postcolonial spaces. Through her readings of literary works belonging to the dawn of colonial enterprises (Walter Raleighs The Discoverie of Guiana and Shakespeares The Tempest), the heyday of the British Empire (H. Rider Haggards She and W.H. Hudsons Green Mansions) and the postcolonial consciousness refashioning old myths and cultural tropes (V.S. Naipauls A Way in the World), the author highlights the crucial role of ideology in narrative plots and literary metaphors concerning space. The imaginative focus of the book is El Dorado, a geographical and literary construction created and recreated at different times, shaped and reshaped in British colonial and postcolonial writing.

Contents: Geography, imagination and literature – Geopoetics: representing space – The contemporary spatial turn – Textuality and narration – Colonial and postcolonial geographies – Cartographies of the British Empire – The myth of Eldorado – Imperial eyes: the lands of colonial desire – Haggard’s South Africa: a landscape of dreams – Fin de siècle topographies of imperial male desire – Hudson’s South America: the lost world of the forest – The postcolonial gaze: visions of loss – Postcolonial displacement and dislocation – Reconfiguring time and space in the postcolonial perspective – V.S. Naipaul’s representation of Trinidad – El Dorado: spatial desire, failure and loss. Inhaltsverzeichnis