The Geographic Imagination of Civil War-Era American Fiction

Abstract

Space is important in literary studies. This was true even before postmodernism's spatial turn a generation ago, and our collective interest in spatial issues has only grown in recent years. Of course, what we mean by space varies widely across the discipline. We have studies of the relationship between literature and geography at scales ranging from the local to the global. We're also interested in the smaller scales of built space and the lived environment. And then there's the longstanding problem of mapping between space and time as organizing principles of narrative and other forms of cultural production.1 This variety doesn't imply that we've made a hash of things. On the contrary, I think we've done well, considering the scope of the problem. But in nearly every case, we work in a way that makes some questions much easier to ask and to answer than others. By this I mean that our need to work with individual texts (and other cultural objects) has led us to study first and foremost specific representations of space and geography, which we've then used as symptomatic indices of larger social configurations. So we've become very good at, for example, determining what Kate Chopin's stories reveal about the nexus of sexuality and Cajun regional culture or, in a different register, how the Las Vegas strip reveals the symbolic function of commercial built space. At the same time, it has often been difficult to assess the extent to which these symptomatic readings apply to larger groups of texts and objects, simply because we've lacked the capacity to apply our methods sequentially across, say, all of the fiction written in the nineteenth century.