Literary Geography

Sheila Hones

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781317695974
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Human Geography
• Index: Social Sciences

Literary Geography provides an introduction to work in the field, making the interdiscipline accessible and visible to students and academics working in literary studies and human geography, as well as related fields such as the geohumanities, place writing and geopoetics.

Emphasising the long tradition of work with literary texts in human geography, this volume:

• provides an overview of literary geography as an interdiscipline, which combines aims and methods from human geography and literary studies
• explains how and why literary geography differs from spatially-oriented critical approaches in literary studies
• reviews geographical work with literary texts from the late 19th century to the present day
• includes a glossary of key terms and concepts employed in contemporary literary geography.

Accessible and clear, this comprehensive overview is an essential guide for anyone interested in learning more about the history, current activity and future of work in the interdiscipline of literary geography.

1

Origins

DOI: 10.4324/9781315778273-2

In the late 1990s, as literary critics began to read spatial theory, and geographers engaged with questions of representation and textuality, opportunities for interdisciplinary exchange of ideas and methods between literary studies and the geographical subfield of literary geography increased. Those opportunities created the potential for a more actively interdisciplinary literary geography, which could have emerged had there been a better mutual understanding at the time of the differences separating the histories, aims, methods and key terms of literary studies and human geography. Unfortunately, as suggested by the fact that literary geography is, even today, routinely described by non-geographers as an ‘emerging’ body of work, literary critics remained generally unaware of, or uninterested in, literary geography as an expression of human geography’s engagement with literary texts. The opportunity which had opened up in the 1990s for an actively interdisciplinary literary geography was for the time being lost. Several decades later, with new opportunities for cooperation, there is now a second chance to attempt a literary geography able to negotiate the historical divisions which separate work in literary studies from work in human geography. The realisation of an actively collaborative interdiscipline now depends on the reciprocal development of a greater awareness not only of how the two fields work separately but also how they could work together.

Two review essays, 1994 and 1998

A comparison of two articles from the 1990s reveals the distance separating literary geography from literary studies at that time: the first, Marc Brosseau’s ‘Geography’s literature’, was published in Progress in Human Geography in 1994; the second, John Kerrigan’s ‘The country of the mind: exploring the links between geography and the writer’s imagination’, was published in the Times Literary Supplement in 1998. While one is very much in the human geography mode and the other a contribution to literary criticism, they deal with recognisably similar topics and have both been influential, with Brosseau’s making its impact in human geography, and Kerrigan’s in literary studies. Since publication, Brosseau’s article has been extensively cited by geographers, but has achieved very little recognition among literary critics; it is only in the past few years that it has started to be cited beyond books and articles written by geographers for geographers. Similarly, but in reverse, Kerrigan’s article went unremarked by geographers, but had a significant impact on the literary studies version of literary geography launched by Andrew Thacker in his influential 2005 article, ‘The idea of a critical literary geography’. Thacker cited Kerrigan’s thoughts on ‘how valuable the findings of a new literary geography could be’ (Kerrigan, 1998: 4) in proposing a literary geography for literary critics that would be able to respond to the fact that ‘since the early 1990s … questions of space and geography have become recognised as legitimate and important topics in many areas of literary and cultural studies’ (57–58). Because Kerrigan’s view of the ‘old’ literary geography was that it had been a false start in humanistic geography which had quickly fizzled out, Thacker had no encouragement to make the connection between his proposed ‘critical literary geography’ and existing literary geography, as practised mainly (but not entirely) by human geographers.

The Brosseau and Kerrigan articles differ markedly in their orientation toward work outside their own field. In proposing ‘a much greater focus on the text itself’ (349) Brosseau was responding to the greater emphasis on discourse and textuality which had developed in human geography as a whole by the mid-1990s, and encouraging geographers to incorporate more work from literary criticism. He asked literary geographers to respect the geographical significance of literary style and narrative method, and to treat literary text as a ‘complex signifying practice’ (349). In a 1995 review essay on landscape geography for Progress in Human Geography, James Duncan reported that the study of literature in geography was ‘being taken to a new level’ by a group of scholars, including Marc Brosseau, who had ‘a view of the humanities which is critical, tough minded and very much au courant de debates within literary and cultural theory’ (419). Joanne Sharp, for example, ‘shows that literature not only can force readers to grapple with questions of cultural identity and alterity but can also be an active force in political and cultural “geo-graphing” of the world outside the text’ (419).

Writing four years after Brosseau, Kerrigan’s essay also emphasised the value of collaboration between literary critics and geographers, but because he based his vision of a ‘new’ literary geography on a radically simplified version of the history of human geography, which erased almost all of its engagement with literary texts (including the Brosseau and Sharp articles from 1994 to 1996), he eliminated much of the historiography most relevant to his vision. Presenting the future of literary geography as a geographically-informed approach within literary criticism, Kerrigan’s intervention meant that for literary studies one of the paradoxical effects of the increased interest in spatial themes, which had motivated his essay, was the establishment of the idea that literary geography was either a limited and ultimately failed experiment by humanistic geographers or a form of popular literary tourism, ‘the sort of guide which belongs in the glove compartment of a car’ (Kerrigan, 1998: 4).

20th century academic literary geography: two versions

The ‘sort of guide’ to which Kerrigan was referring falls into the category of popular literary gazetteers or books for literary tourists, one of the two originating forms of literary geography. While these double origins are now generally acknowledged, in 1990 geographers Allan Noble and Ramesh Dhussa still associated the term ‘literary geography’ solely with academic work in human geography, regarding William Sharp’s Literary Geography – an early example of the popular form – as ‘not a work in literary geography’ at all (1990: 50). Noble and Dhussa’s review of literary geography for Journal of Cultural Geography covered the period from 1910 to the late 1980s, by which time, in their view, ‘literary geography seemed to be well established as a recognized research specialization of the larger [geographical] discipline’ (59). Noting that the number of papers on literary geography at the annual meeting of the Association of American Geographers remained ‘small but constant’, they considered the possibility that a ‘plateau of interest’ had been reached. They contemplated two possibilities for post-1990 literary geography: the more pessimistic was that ‘the subject has been exhausted as a source of intellectual inquiry’; the alternative was that

initial directions have been pursued and original objectives reached and that a kind of marking time is occurring during which materials will be digested and gains in scholarship consolidated until a new spurt of creative energy is released, perhaps by an as yet unrecognized scholar.

(61)

Four years after Noble and Dhussa’s review, the publication of Marc Brosseau’s ‘Geography’s literature’ in Progress in Human Geography, based on his recently completed PhD thesis, indicated that the more hopeful of the two possible futures was being realised.

Nevertheless, in his 1998 sketch of the history of human geography in ‘The country of the mind’, John Kerrigan disregarded the history of geographical work with literary texts sketched by Noble and Dhussa. Not surprisingly, this had a negative impact on the awareness and understanding of literary geography within literary studies. Presenting the emergence of humanistic literary geography in the 1970s as something entirely new, a reaction to ‘the waves of grand theory and quantitative analysis which swept through the subject in the 1960s’ (3), Kerrigan’s version of human geography was able to overlook its sustained interest in literary texts for a couple of reasons: first, he concentrated on mainstream interests; and second, he focused on monographs or book-length collections. For much of its history, however, the geographical subfield of work with literary texts was sustained not in book publications but in articles published in geographical journals and in presentations and discussions at conferences; book-length studies only began to appear in the 1970s. In fact all of the examples Kerrigan provides of what happened when ‘adventurous geographers turned to literature’ are taken from one edited collection: D.C.D. Pocock’s 1981 Humanistic Geography and Literature, which, by the time of his review essay, was some 17 years old. According to Kerrigan, as geographers in the 1970s began to reconsider ‘the importance of agency and affect in the shaping and use of space’ it ‘did not long escape them that a great deal of poetry and prose fiction … is about how people belong to places or are alienated from them, how they reimagine their surroundings and infuse localities with emotion’ (3). In other words, Kerrigan suggests that it was a revelation to geographers in the 1970s that poetry and prose fiction could be used as a resource in the study of people’s relationships with places and localities.

J.K. Wright

Although Kerrigan’s understanding was that geographical work with literary texts had been a new development in the 1970s, Noble and Dhussa had noted in their 1990 review essay that ‘as early as the 1920s, a few American geographers began to express the view that literary works could be explored to understand more fully the meaning of both natural and cultural worlds’ (52). Two major American geographers of this era, Carl Sauer and John Kirtland Wright, ‘realised independently … that literature was an untapped resource which opened up an altogether new dimension in understanding space’ (52). While Sauer ‘drew the attention of future researchers toward literature’ in a general sense, J.K. Wright had a direct impact on the beginnings of academic literary geography. Wright’s legacy in geographical perception, humanistic geography, geographical subjectivity and literary geography is reviewed in Michael Handley’s ‘John K. Wright and human nature in geography’ (1993). Handley explains that although by the early 20th century human geography in general was prioritising environmental determinism, Sauer’s ‘Foreword to historical geography’ (1941) was an early ‘recognition of the importance of perception in geography’. Handley also makes the point that where Sauer was interested in the geographical knowledge of elites and of cultures as entireties, Wright’s interest was in ‘all levels of geographical thinking’, his new term ‘geosophy’ referring to ‘the study of geographical knowledge from any or all points of view’. Wright’s ideas resurfaced in the early 1960s with the publication of David Lowenthal’s ‘Geography, Experience, and Imagination’ (1961), which would form the basis for later studies in subjective and imaginative geographies.

Similarly, although it was Kerrigan’s understanding that the modern development of geography ‘involved a calculated detachment from the literary’, J.K. Wright’s influence on literary geography began with a series of unsigned essays for the Geographical Review in the 1920s and 1930s, which looked in turn at ‘Geography in literature’, ‘The geography of Dante’, ‘Homeric geography’, ‘Geography of the Odyssey’ and ‘Bibliographical sources for geographical fiction’. And while Kerrigan claimed that perhaps the earliest example of a form of literary geography, Strabo’s discussion of Homer in his ‘Geography’, ‘has been of little interest to geographers since the eighteenth century’, one of Wright’s early essays, ‘A plea for the history of geography’ (1926) opens with a discussion of Strabo’s debates with Erasthenes on the question of whether Homer should be read as a poet or a scientific authority. Taken as a whole, Wright’s publications in this era provide evidence of the early years of a tradition of geographical work with literary texts. While there is some legitimacy to Kerrigan’s view that while the ‘commanding founders of the discipline’ were skilled writers, the ‘positivism which drove their subject discouraged reflexive thinking about linguistic aspects of culture’, Wright’s essays, along with other work in literary geography from the 1910s to 1930s, show that this is an oversimplification.

In the long run, J.K. Wright’s primary influence on literary geography is likely to have stemmed not so much from his essays for Geographical Review as from his Presidential address to the 1946 meeting of the American Association of Geographers, subsequently published in the association’s Annals as ‘Terrae incognitae: the place of the imagination in geography’ (1947). Here Wright restated his lifelong interest in the geographical ideas ‘of all manner of people – not only geographers, but farmers and fishermen, business executives and poets, novelists and painters’ (1947: 12). It was this interest in the geographical imagination (‘geosophy’) that made Wright’s work, published between the mid-1920s and the late 1940s, so important for literary geography. While it is true that Wright was always somewhat out of step with the dominant aims and methods of American geography during his lifetime, his long-term contribution to human geography in general, and literary geography in particular, turned out to be of major significance. Wright’s importance for the history of literary geography rests on two points: first, the emphasis he placed on the geographical imagination and subjectivity in geographical research; and second his openness to the value of literary sources.

Academic literary geography 1910–1940

While Strabo’s Geography and Von Humboldt’s Cosmos of 1847, two works dealing with geography and art, are sometimes cited as the starting points for modern literary geography, geographical work with literary texts has more commonly been dated from Scottish geologist Archibald Geikie’s 1898 Types of Scenery and Their Influence on Literature. First presented as the 1898 annual public lecture at Oxford University and published in the same year, Types of Scenery sets out to ‘discuss the leading types of scenery that distinguish the British Isles, and to inquire how far it may be possible to trace from each of them an influence upon the growth of English literature’ (6). Noble and Dhussa give an alternative starting point for literary geography in their 1990 review essay, dating its history from climatologist H.R. Mill’s 1910 Guide to Geographical Books and Appliances, citing specifically its chapter on ‘Geographical novels’, which for them marked ‘the first serious consideration of the value and use of literature by a geographer’ (51).

Mill’s Guide of 1910 was also mentioned by Wright in his 1924 essay ‘Geography in literature’. While Wright notes that Mill provides accurate and lively descriptions useful for teaching purposes, for him the value of the geographical novels described by Mill goes beyond setting:

[S]cenes are frequently described at some length, and, better still, they may form an integral part of the narrative, as when the peculiarities of the district or of the people influence the course of the story. This is an important part of the value of a geographical novel: it may show by actual examples that working out of the various forces and inter-action of the various factors that is of the essence of geography.

(59)

Where Geikie was interested in the influence of types of scenery on the development of English literature, and Mill was concerned with lively description and the interactions of place and people, Elias Lieberman’s The American Short Story: A Study of the Influence of Locality in its Development (1912) focused on the impact of local geography on literary production in the USA. A little later, in 1920, the Leeds Branch of the British Geographical Association published D. Wharton’s Short List of Novels and Literary Works of Geographic Interest. Work on literary texts and geography published in the UK in this era also included J.N.L. Baker’s article ‘The geography of Daniel Defoe’ for the Scottish Geographical Journal in 1931. Baker emphasises Defoe’s ‘great skill’ in blending fact and fiction in the production of textual geography, despite the fact that he travelled very little and that as a result ‘his knowledge came from wide reading, from diligent study of newspapers, and from contact with a great variety of men’ (258). Baker’s article marks a very early example of work dealing with the way fiction combines and blends ‘real world’ and ‘imagined’ geographies: not simply ‘representing’ landscapes and places but articulating a mixed geographical knowledge made up from different kinds of information and knowledge, some first-hand, some the result of reading and conversation.

J.K. Wright also mentions Robert Ramsay’s 1921 Short Stories of America, which included 16 short stori...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Series Editor’s Preface
• Introduction
• 1. Origins
• 2. Aims and Methods
• 3. Genres
• 4. Mappings
• 5. Representation
• 6. Futures
• Glossary
• Bibliography
• Index