Unsettling Narratives

This book takes a literary geographical approach to the study of folklore, exploring the complex relationships between people, narratives and places as they emerge through belief, storytelling and ritual practice. Drawing on human geography, folkloristics and literary studies, it demonstrates how folk narratives inform and shape geographical imaginings, influencing lived experiences of actual-world environments. An examination of Yanagita Kunio’s (1910) Tno Monogatari, a volume of 119 folktales from the northeast of Japan, highlights the formative role folk narratives play in shaping regional identities and cultural memory. Unsettling Narratives identifies folklore as a key process through which place acquires meaning, thereby facilitating a deeper engagement with the intersections of text, space and communal narratives. By emphasising the spatial significance of folkloric storytelling, this book provides new methodological and theoretical pathways for literary geographers to explore the co-constitution of narrative and place across local, regional and global scales.

Author Biography

James Thurgill is a specially appointed associate professor in the Department of English Language at the University of Tokyo, Japan. He is a fellow of the Royal Geographical Society.