Adina Ciugureanu and Eduard Vlad (eds.), Mapping American Spaces in Literature and Beyond: Eastern European Perspectives, Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2025, 254 p.

Abstract

The editors of and contributors to this ambitious volume explore critical spatial thinking in American literature and culture as well as digital humanities through what they call an “Eastern European perspective.” This perspective – Robert T. Tally Jr. clarifies in his “Foreword”– points to “a literal but also critical distance from the United States and its cultures that is extraordinarily productive,” since the authors come mostly from Romania and Turkey, a space “allowing them to excavate and illuminate sites of cultural fecundity with an acute awareness of the distinctiveness of the spaces surveyed” (vi).