Literary Geography, the Spatial Unconscious and The Unknown Industrial Prisoner

TLDR: In this paper, the second half of the book's theoretical lens in the shape of literary geography is presented, where the authors argue that the best way to address this shortcoming is through an organic fusion of radical geographic and literary geographic concepts, unified in the idea of the literary text possessing a spatial unconscious.

Abstract: This chapter unfolds the second half of the book’s theoretical lens in the shape of literary geography. The chapter will proceed from the premise of Saunders that literature ‘knows things’ about the spatiality of the society in which it is born. However, a key conceptual question is what exactly it is that literature knows. Using the insights of structural Marxist literary theory, in particular the work of Eagleton, Macherey and Jameson, we can ascertain exactly what this type of knowledge is; namely, a knowledge crafted through putting the ideology of a social formation to work. The raw material of literature is ideology, which is then worked into a textual product through literary forms which are themselves ideological. With this understanding in hand, a brief survey will establish that, although literary geography has great potential to analyse the class constitution of space, it has generally under-explored and under-theorised this phenomenon. This chapter will suggest that the best way to address this shortcoming is through an organic fusion of radical geographic and literary geographic concepts, unified in the idea of the literary text possessing a spatial unconscious. Through putting ideology to work, authors can explore spatial structures, tease out their contradictions and provide creative symbols demonstrating their inner logic. The chapter will conclude by giving a short synopsis of TUIP and identifying some of the more important themes that cross Ireland’s corpus and will recur in the course of the analysis.