"It is hard to conceive of a subject that has been more paralysed by disciplinary boundaries than the study of regional fiction," writes K. D. M. Snell in justification of the present collection of essays (52). Yet over the last decade or so, literary scholars have paid increasing attention to matters of geography and cartography, material, social, and symbolic space, the political territorialities of nation and empire, and the formation of a modern world system. Snell's complaint, in the course of an otherwise learned and wide-ranging Introduction, seems out of touch with these developments, which have involved quite a bit of rethinking of disciplinary categories and approaches. The contributors to this volume tend to conceive of their interdisciplinary project in strictly thematic and referential terms, tracing the incidence of geographical and sociological data in a selection of novels, more often than not correlated with the author's biography. The book draws attention to the sheer extent and variety of regional fiction in English, much of it neglected--a companion bibliographical volume is in the works--and it contains several fine essays, as well as a great deal of useful information. But it fails to add up to the kind of renovating overview or radical reimagining of its topic that we find, for instance, in Franco Moretti's Atlas of the European Novel, 1800-1900 (1997), which draws upon a Continental tradition of "geografia storica." This is only in part because a collection of essays by diverse hands cannot offer the coherent argument of a single author--after all, a variety of approaches can [End Page 153] be an asset. The present set of contributions seems more than usually a mixed bag, and it's hard to discern a rationale behind the selection of topics and approaches.