Literary Geographies and the Interspatiality of Academic Journals

This essay contributes to discussions of academic journal publishing in two ways: first by providing an account of the independent, unfunded, and fully open-access journal Literary Geographies, and then by suggesting the literary-geographical concept of interspatiality as a potentially useful way of articulating the impact of different models of academic journal publishing on the lived human geographies of individual scholars. This approach is enabled by recent work in the kind of literary geography that takes the “literary” of literary geography to include the full range of literary practices of reading, writing, and publishing and its “geography” to include the human geographies of daily life. The essay proposes that journal publishing is an area of academic work where literary practices are inescapably entangled with the social geographies inhabited by scholars and academics, and that as a result it becomes possible to think of it in literary-geographical terms as an interspatiality. This means that the journal Literary Geographies can itself be theorized, analyzed and discussed as a case study in the impossibility of separating the lived human experience of academic worlds from the literary practices of writing, reading and publishing that create and sustain them.