Imaginative regions

Abstract

<div lang="en" class="abs"><p class="abs_header">Abstract</p><p>This essay introduces how literature works as a sociocultural institution inducing people to imagine and comprehend both abstract and lived spaces as certain forms of regional systems. Understanding regions as imaginative is approached here from two perspectives. Firstly, it considers how the human imagination generates a regional form as an outcome of social processes connected with power and otherness, and secondly, it looks at how regional narratives, as descriptions of local cultures, lifestyle and habits, blur the conventional (e.g. administrative) ways of structuring space as a specific kind of region system. In addition the chapter briefly exemplifies how literature is used, at the local scale, as a resource for region-building processes in which local heritage and culture are maintained.</p></div>