This work investigates a cluster of concepts that gather around the question of topography and its uses in criticism. They include the initiating efficacy of speech acts, ethical responsibility, political or legislative power and the relation of personification to landscape.

Introduction: 1. Philosophy, literature, topography Heidegger and Hardy 2. Face to face: faces, places and ethics in Plato 3. Laying down the law in literature: Kleist 4. Sam Wellers valentine: Dickens 5. Temporal topographies: Tennyson's tears 6. Naming, doing, placing: Hopkins 7. Nietzsche in Basel: changing places in Thus Spoke Zarathustra 8. Ideology and topography: Faulkner 9. Slipping vaulting crossing: Heidegger 10. The ethics of topography: Stevens 11. Derrida's topographies 12. Border crossings, translating theory Ruth Notes Index.