Spatial Imaginaries in Mid-Tang China: Geography, Cartography, an ...

for their particular geographical quests and have spent little time on the literary texts themselves.¹⁸ As a result, they have limited themselves largely to realistic depictions of places and environments while losing sight of literature’s potential to offer other types of geography through its inherent form and its singular use of language. Scholars have therefore called for a more dialogical relationship between geography and literature, one that pays due attention to the poetic language and form of literature.¹⁹

In recent years, we have witnessed increasing scholarly efforts to make the interaction between literature and geography a two-way street, most prominently to consider geographical and literary texts in light of each other. For example, the geographer Edmunds Bunkse, in his book Geography and the Art of Life, combines geography and literature to recall his World War II childhood experience. He not only evokes literary works to help him articulate his subjective experience of different places and landscapes, but also demonstrates that scholarly geographical work can be literature, and therefore may be subjected to the same critical reading process that literary scholars have used for poetry and novels.²⁰ Literary scholars, on the other hand, have analyzed the fictional and narrativized “spaces” in literary texts through a juxtaposition of literary descriptions with real geographic spaces, invoking principles of geographic spatial analysis in the process.²¹ Building upon these efforts, Sheila Hones, the author of several recent monographs on literary geography, suggests a thorough integration of the two disciplines. She proposes that an ideal work of literary geography “has to be done in such a way that neither the literature (the texts and the study of those texts) nor the geography (the world and the study of that world) become reduced to the status of subject matter, theme, or raw data. In order to achieve this interdisciplinary balance, literary geography has to go beyond the literary analysis of geographical themes or the geographical analysis of literary texts. Literature and geography have to function as a combined double subject, on the one hand, and a combined, double, theoretical, and methodological framework, on the other.”²² In other words, we may say that both literature and geography need to be treated as text and