---

This volume moves the debate about literature and geography in a new direction by showing the significance of spatial settings in the enormous and complex field of popular fiction. Approaching popular genres as complicated systems of meaning, the collected essays model key theoretical and critical approaches for interrogating the meaning of space and place across diverse genres, including crime, thrillers, fantasy, science fiction, and romance. Including topics such as classic English ghost stories, blockbuster Antarctic thrillers, prize-winning Montreal crime fiction, J. R. R. Tolkien´s Middle-earth, and China Miéville´s Bas-Lag, among others, this book brings together analyses of the real-and-imagined settings of some of the most widely read authors and texts of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries to show how they have an immeasurable impact on our spatial awareness and imagination.

---

CONTENTS

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgements

Introduction: Space, Place and Popular Fiction

Lisa Fletcher

Chapter 1: Cave Genres/Genre Caves: Reading the Subterranean Thriller

Ralph Crane and Lisa Fletcher

Chapter 2: Unstable Places and Generic Spaces: Thrillers Set in Antarctica

Elizabeth Leane

Chapter 3: Chronotopic Reading of Crime Fiction: Montréal in La Trace de l´Escargot

Marc Brosseau and Pierre-Mathieu Le Bel

Chapter 4: Romance in the Backblocks in New Zealand Popular Fiction, 1930-1950: Mary Scott´s Barbara Stories

Jane Stafford

Chapter 5: The Inside Story: Jennifer Crusie and the Architecture of Love

William Gleason

Chapter 6: Ghost-Al Erosion: Beaches and the Supernatural in Two Stories by

M. R. James

Lucie Armitt

Chapter 7: Pagan Places: Contemporary Paganism, British Fantasy Fiction, and the Case of Ryhope Wood

Kim Wilkins

Chapter 8: Tolkien´s Geopolitical Fantasy: Spatial Narrative in The Lord of the Rings

Robert T. Tally Jr.

Chapter 9: Commuting to Another World: Spaces of Transport and Transport Maps in Urban Fantasy

David Pike

Chapter 10: Mapping Monstrosity: Metaphorical Geographies in China Miéville´s Bas-Lag Trilogy

Robert A. Saunders

Chapter 11: Air Force One: Popular (Non)Fiction in Flight

Christopher Schaberg

Chapter 12: States of Nostalgia in the Genre of the Future: Panem, Globalization, and Utopia in The Hunger Games Trilogy

Eric D. Smith and Kylie Korsnack

Bibliography

Notes on Contributors

Index

---

Lisa Fletcher is Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Tasmania, Australia. Her books include Historical Romance Fiction: Heterosexuality and Performativity (2008), and (with Ralph Crane) Cave: Nature and Culture (2015). Her current research focuses on twenty-first-century Australian popular fiction.

---