World views: metageographies of modernist fiction

Abstract

World views: metageographies of modernist fiction, by Jon Hegglund, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2012, xvii +191 pp., US$49.95 (hardback), ISBN 978-0-1997-9610-6 Jon Hegglund's World Views: Metageographies of Modernist Fiction is fruit born of a twentieth-century disciplinary turn which witnessed concept of spatiality infiltrate humanities. Subsequently, mapping once province of surveyors and cartographers, became in a postmodern twist, an apt metaphor for scholars exploring spatial dimensions of literature. In this regard, Hegglund's book echoes and complements both Andrew Thacker and Peter Brooker's Moving Through Modernity: Space and Geography in Modernism (2003) and Bertrand Westphal's Geocriticism: Real and Fictional Space (2011). Influenced by work of geographers Martin Lewis and Karen Wigen, Hegglund (2012, p. 6) defines metageography as the conceptual framework that presents condition for possibility of geography--the architecture within which various geographies are housed. Hegglund is concerned with Modernists of early twentieth century and their depictions of Africa, England, and Ireland, as well as postcolonial writers of latter of half of century situated in Caribbean and India. The metageography which forms framework for Hegglund's text is imperial world view espoused by British geographer Halford MacKinder. A tenacious and influential scholar, MacKinder was able to facilitate colonization of an imperial worldview into powerful halls of Western governments, universities, military academies, and policy think-tanks just as globe was commencing to decolonize and deconstruct in wake of World War II, and emergence of postmodernism. Hegglund examines authors primarily located within cultural matrix of British Empire, which in his view have lost faith in imperial framework of geographical space as a terrafirma for their narrative worlds. Hegglund (2012, p. 2) argues that skepticism about manifests itself through, and increased attention to, language and discourse of geography within modernist and postcolonial narratives explored in his book. World Hews thus investigates tensions contained between cartographical and political schemas imposed by imperial geographies and writers whose works provide alternatives to nation-state posed by geographical modernism. Hegglund juxtaposes geographical and spatial thought of late nineteenth and twentieth centuries with works of authors who contest imperial framings of place. Adopting parlance of a geographer, he organizes his work on following different scales and concepts. He commences with continent to explore well-trod exegetical path of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness (1902/1990) and often overlooked Graham Greene piece of travel writing, Journey without Maps (1936/1992). He then continues with region and explores glocal contained in tension between Howard Forster's Howard's End (1910) and Patrick Geddes's landmark urban study, Cities in Evolution (1915). Adding another leaf to multitude of slain forests which have contributed pages to books on James Joyce, Hegglund's chapter Internal Colony explores Ulysses (1922) and its nightmare dreamseapes of Irish colonial history with a discussion of Ordinance Survey of Ireland in shaping Joycean perspectives of Dublin. …