Publisher’s presentation

     This book is both a study of the work of the Scottish writer, Kenneth White, in thought, travel writing and poetry, and an application of one of White’s main concepts, geopoetics, to Charles Doughty’s Arabia Deserta. It is a largely forgotten fact that Doughty considered all his travels to be leading up to an ars poetica. Omar Bsaïthi’s thesis is that Arabia Deserta is a superb example of geopoetics in action. The result of the meeting of White and Doughty orchestrated by Bsaïthi is not only the reinterpretation of an English classic and perhaps a renewal of Arab studies, it is an introduction, via the writings of Kenneth White, to a regrounded field of culture.

Omar Bsaïthi is professor of English at Mohammed I University, Oujda, Morocco. Land and Mind is his first major publication. In 2006, he founded a multidisciplinary research team, Space and Culture, which aims at opening up new horizons in the field of humanities, namely by exploring new correlations.