Markku Salmela

University Lecturer, Tampere University

Markku Salmela has 20 years of experience investigating the spatial dimensions of textuality, and most of his publications stem from this long-term interest.

He is the author of Paul Auster’s Spatial Imagination (2006) and the co-editor of several volumes, including, most recently, Literature and the Peripheral City (2015), Topographies of Popular Culture (2016), and Literary Second Cities (2017). These books reflect a consistent emphasis on the different geographies of fiction and the margins of canonical landscapes, concerns also present in the book series Literary Urban Studies, which he co-edits for Palgrave Macmillan. He has organised conferences and taught many advanced courses on such topics. Some of his published articles, such as “The Grotesque Landscape and the Naturalistic Method” (2011), address issues characteristic of Arctic imaginaries.

In the context of the project, Markku is working on a short monograph that explores the significance of subterranean and submarine spaces in contemporary Arctic fiction in relation to pressing environmental concerns such as the global interest in Arctic resources. His primary focus is on the ways in which these mediated spaces employ and transform established tropes of Arctic landscape. To uncover the specificity of the Arctic underground, he investigates the nature of imagined under-the-surface spatialities from a wide perspective, comparing their Arctic manifestations with those familiar from other environments (such as the urban and the volcanic underground).

Markku Salmela can be contacted at markku.salmela@tuni.fi