Teaching and Learning Guide for: Text as it happens – literary geography
Authors: Hones Sheila 
Published: November 2009

This guide accompanies the following article: Sheila Hones, Text as it happens – literary geography, Geography Compass 3 (2009): pp 1‐6. 10.1111/j.1749‐8198.2009.00291.x

1. Author’s Introduction

One of the major challenges to the development of literary geography as a coherent geographical field has been the extent to which work attempting to link literary texts and literary studies with geographical interests and spatial theory has varied according to discipline, methodological orientation, era, academic context and scholarly purpose. This history of diversity has also inhibited the development of cross‐disciplinary literary‐geographical work.

Thrift’s (2006) four propositions about space offer one potentially accommodating framework for work in literary geography. First, he argues that space is everywhere and everything is spatial. This is an important reminder that space is the key to narrative generally, and hence that literary geography involves much more than the analysis of landscape description and setting. It also usefully directs attention towards extra‐textual geographies relating to manuscript production, book distribution, canon formation, and academic criticism.

Second, he emphasises the point that spatial boundaries are permeable. Fiction leaks into the real, and vice versa: stories have settings, for example, and settings have stories. Additionally, as texts become activated in varying contexts, those text events bring writers, readers, texts, and books together in ways that render them inseparable and mutually influential.

Third, he notes that space is not static but always in motion. This suggests not only that writers, readers, texts and books themselves are literally mobile but also that narrative strategy itself always produces a mobile and unfixed time‐space geography.

Finally, space is not singular: there are many kinds of space and these various spatial dimensions co‐exist heterarchically. We can make this directly relevant to literary geography first in terms of textually mediated geographies (as for example as in Brosseau’s distinction between the geographies ‘in’ the novel and the geographies ‘of’’ the novel) and second in relation to geographies of shared readings, knowledge production, and reader response.

Thrift, N. (2006) Space. Theory, Culture and Society 23 (2–3), pp. 139–146.

2. Background Reading

This list introduces some of the key English‐language commentaries on and reviews of the field within social and cultural geography.

1. Wright, J. K. (1924). Geography in literature. Geographical Review 14 (84), pp. 659–660.

In this unsigned two‐page comment, Wright introduces evidence of the ‘geographical instinct’ of writers who have ‘trained themselves to visualize even more clearly than the professional geographer those regional elements of the earth’s surface most significant to the general run of humanity’.

2. Salter, C. L., and Lloyd, W. J. (1977). Landscape in literature. Resource Papers for College Geography 76‐3. Washington, DC: Association of American Geographers.

Concentrating on the use of literary texts in the geography classroom, this focuses on how ‘signatures of the cultural landscape’ are made visible in fictional settings: the aim is to ‘see patterns more clearly in literature and landscape’ in order to appreciate ‘how completely mankind has been responsible for the form of the world we live in’.

3. Tuan, Y.‐F. (1978). Literature and geography: implications for geographical research. In: Ley, D., & Samuels, M. S. (eds) Humanistic geography. Chicago: Maaroufa Press, pp. 194–206.

Tuan argues that ‘literary art serves the geographer in three principal ways’: (i) as ‘a thought experiment’ suggesting topics of study; (ii) as an artefact in the history of ideas; (iii) as a model for geographical work that balances the subjective and the objective.

4. Thrift, N. (1978). Landscape and literature. Letters to the editor. Environment and Planning A 10, pp. 347–349.

In this response to Salter and Lloyd’s Landscape in literature, Thrift characterizes the practice of working with chunks of decontextualized landscape description as a form of ‘stamp collecting’.

5. Barrell, J. (1982). Geographies of Hardy’s Wessex. Journal of Historical Geography 8, pp. 347–361.

This article focuses on the way in which Hardy’s narrative method manages to hold irreconcilable spatial ‘modes of knowing’ in tension in the juxtaposition of various narrative voices and in the projection of an impossibly complex implied reader.

6. Silk, J. (1984). Beyond geography and literature. Environment and Planning D 2, pp. 151–178.

Silk argues for a materialist analysis as a challenge to bourgeois ideology, recommending feminism, regionalism, separatism, nationalism, and landscape or environmental appreciation as appropriate research themes for literary geography.

7. Mallory, W. E. and Simpson‐Housley, P. (1987). Geography and literature: a meeting of the disciplines. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press.

This collection, which includes essays by geographers, literary critics and literary authors, sets out to ‘bridge the gap between the geographer’s factual descriptions and the writer’s flights of imagination’. The introductory essay by J.W. Miller makes the case for a regionalist approach to literary geography.

8. Pocock, D. C. D. (1988). Geography and literature. Progress in Human Geography 12 (1), pp. 87–102.

Pocock characterises geography’s ‘interface with literature’ as having two main dimensions: (i) ‘substantive or data‐seeking’ and (ii) ‘methodological or philosophical’. He distinguishes geographical contributions to literary criticism from the work of the ‘geographer qua geographer’, which he argues should focus not on particular authors but on the study of ‘an area, topic or people’.

9. Brosseau, M. (1994). Geography’s literature. Progress in Human Geography 18, pp. 333–353.

Brosseau builds on a review of ‘how literature was integrated into the broader intellectual agenda of geographers’ to argue that literary geography has been characterised by ‘the partial silencing of the literary text as a text’. He calls for more attention to be paid to the ways in which texts generate ‘norms, particular models of readibility, that produce a particular kind of geography’.

10. Sharp, J. (2000). Towards a critical analysis of fictive geographies. Area 32 (3), pp. 327–334.

Although acknowledging the difficulties of assessing the ways in which non‐specialist audiences actually read and respond to fiction, Sharp emphasises the need to include studies of reception, consumption and social impact as well as interpretative criticism in literary geography.

For comparative cross‐disciplinary purposes, see for example:

Blair, S. (1998). Cultural geography and the place of the literary. American Literary History 10 (3), pp. 545–567.

Thacker, A. (2005–2006). The idea of a critical literary geography. New Formations 57, pp. 145–149.

Jones, E. (2008). Literature and the new cultural geography. Anglia: Zeitschrift fur Englische Philologie 126 (2), pp. 221–240.

3. Sample Syllabus with Focus Questions and Practical Exercises

This syllabus is designed to suggest ways in which geographers might make productive connections between spatial theory and fiction. The goal is to read fiction spatially, building on ideas suggested by existing studies in geography and literary studies.

1: Narrative space: the text event

Focus: Where does fiction happen?

Reading: (1) McGurl, M. (1999). Social geometries: taking place in Henry James. Representations (68), pp. 59–83.

(2) Abbott, E. A. Flatland: a romance of many dimensions. (1884). In: multiple editions, including Stewart, I. (ed. and intro) The annotated Flatland (2002). New York: Basic Books.

Gibson, W. (1985). ‘Johnny Mnemonic’. In Gibson, W. (2000) Burning chrome and other stories. London: Voyager.

Practice: Where do the events in Flatland and ‘Johnny Mnemonic’ take place? Do either of these stories have ‘a setting’?

2: Permeable boundaries: fact and fiction

Focus: How real are fictional settings? In what ways are real places fictional?

Reading: (1) Crang, M. (2003). Placing Jane Austen, displacing England: touring between book, history and nation. In: Pucci, S.R. & Thompson, J. (eds) Jane Austen and Co. Albany, NY: SUNY Press, pp. 111–130.

Henderson, G. L. (1999). California & the fictions of capital. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, Introduction, pp. ix–xix; Chapter 4, pp. 123–49.

Tuan, Y.‐F. (1985). The landscapes of Sherlock Holmes. Journal of Geography 84 (2), pp. 56–60.

(2) Conan Doyle, A. ‘The adventure of the empty house’ (1903) first US publication: Collier’s, September 26, 1903; first UK publication: Strand Magazine, October 1903.

Practice: Visit the website for the Sherlock Holmes museum supposedly located on the site of 221B Baker St, London (or visit the museum itself). Was this visit to the invented ‘real’ setting mediated by your reading? Has your reading been influenced by this visit?

3: Multiple texts and multiple authors

Focus: The networked text: issues of editing, publication and revision.

Reading: (1) Horne, P. (1998). Henry James at work: the question of our texts. In: Freedman, J. (ed.) The Cambridge companion to Henry James. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

McWhirter, D. (1995). The whole chain of relation and responsibility: Henry James and the New York Edition. In: McWhirter, D. (ed.) Henry James’s New York Edition: The construction of authorship. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

Practice: What do the histories of the publication, revision and editing processes involved in James’s work add to our understanding of its geographies? In what different senses can ‘the text’ be located?

4: Setting and narrative style

Focus: Geographies ‘in’ fiction and geographies ‘of’ fiction.

Reading: (1) Brady, M. P. (1999). The contrapuntal geographies of Woman Hollering Creek and other stories. American Literature 71 (1), pp. 117–150.

Brosseau, M. (1995). The city in textual form: Manhattan Transfer’s New York. Ecumene 2, pp. 89–114.

(2) Cisneros, S. (1991). Woman Hollering Creek and other stories. New York: Random House.

Practice: How does the Cisneros story ‘Mericans’ enact the socio‐spatial complexity of Mexico City in its form (narrative style) as well as in its content (narrative action)?

5: Genre and representation

Focus: Geographies of fantastic fiction: writing the unwritable.

Reading: (1) Kneale, J. (2006). From beyond: H. P. Lovecraft and the place of horror. Cultural Geographies 13 (1), pp. 106–126.

(2) Lovecraft, H. P. (1925). The Unnamable. In: Joshi, S. T. (ed.) The dreams in the witch house and other weird stories. London: Penguin, pp. 82–89.

Practice: Thinking about the limits of representation and the challenge of ‘writing the unwritable’, compare ‘The Unnamable’ with ‘Burning Chrome’ and with the first chapter of Flatland.

6: The heterarchic narrative

Focus: Distinguishing between different voices in the text: author, authorial persona, narrators, ‘centres of consciouness’.

Reading: (1) Hones, S. (1993). The landscape according to whom? Place and point of view in Willa Cather’s ‘A Wagner Matinée. Keisen Jogakuen College Bulletin 5, pp. 109–131.

(2) Cather, Willa. (1905). A Wagner Matinée. In: O’Brien, S. (ed.) Willa Cather: early novels and stories. New York: Library of America, pp. 102–110.

Practice: Describe the ‘I’ voice in the story ‘Never Marry a Mexican’ from Woman Hollering Creek. In what ways would you distinguish the narrator from the author in this story? In what ways can this distinction be understood spatially?

7: Multiple readers

Focus: Distinguishing between different kinds of readers: ‘intended’, ‘ideal’, ‘implied’ and ‘resisting’.

Reading: (1) Barnett, C. (1996). ‘A Choice of nightmares’: narration and desire. Heart of Darkness. Gender, Place and Culture 3 (3), pp. 277–292.

Barrell, J. (1982). Geographies of Hardy’s Wessex. Journal of Historical Geography 8, pp. 347–361.

Practice: What kinds of readers, inhabiting what kind of spaces, would you associate with the story ‘Never Marry a Mexican’? Do you experience any kind of resistance in reading this story? Do you experience a sense of distance from the ‘I’ voice?

8: Shared readings

Focus: Sharing readings in social contexts.

Reading: (1) Kneale, J. (1999). The virtual realities of technology and fiction: reading William Gibson’s Cyberspace. In: Crang, M., Crang, P. and May, J. (eds) Virtual geographies. London and New York: Routledge, pp. 205–221.

Torsney, C. B. (2000). ‘We are family’? The immaterial community of the James family discussion list. Henry James Review 21, pp. 298–304.

(2) Gibson, W. (1985). Burning chrome. In: William Gibson (2000) Burning chrome and other stories. London: Voyager.

Practice: Prepare 2 sets of comments on ‘Burning Chrome’: (1) for an informal reading group and (2) for an academic seminar on geographies of cyberspace. Discuss the key differences between the two sets of comments.

9: Intertextuality

Focus: Relationships between texts, and between writing and reading

Reading: (1) Surgeoner, J. C. (2007). A feminist literary cartography of the Canadian North: women, writing and place in Aritha van Herk’s Places far from Ellesmere. Gender, Place and Culture. 14 (6), pp. 641–658.

(2) Crane, S. (1898). The bride comes to yellow sky. Repr. In: Scharnhorst, G. (2005) (ed.) The Red badge of courage and other stories. New York: Penguin Books, pp. 151–165.

Veenendaal, C. (1973). On my fourteenth wedding anniversary I ride on trains, Repr. In: Hedin, R. (1996) (ed.) The great machines: poems and songs of the American railroad. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, pp. 173–174.

Practice: What’s spatial about intertextuality? Identify exactly what the poet has changed or cut in her use of the quotation from the story. Would you be able to make sense of the poem without reading the story? Does your reading of the poem add to your reading of the story?

10: Interdisciplinarity

Focus: Disciplinarity and the challenges of interdisciplinary collaboration.

Reading: (1) Ogborn, M. (2005–2006). Mapping words. New Formations 57, pp. 145–149.

(2) Phillips, R. (1997). Introduction, Mapping men and empire: a geography of adventure. London: Routledge, pp. 1–21.

Thacker, A. (2003). Chapter I: Theorising space and place in modernism. In: Moving through modernity: space and geography in modernism. Manchester: Manchester UP, pp. 13–45.

Practice: What’s spatial about disciplinarity? Do the two book chapters seem to locate themselves in different academic spaces? Do they seem to be addressing different ‘implied readers’?