Literature, Geography and

For centuries, readers have flocked to the places described in works of literature—to Dickens's London, to Joyce's Dublin, to “Tara” or the home of Anne of Green Gables—and geographers have realized that works of fiction offer powerful interpretations of landscape, character, and memory that in turn influence the very real places the novels fictionalize. [Page 279]Although a specialization called literary geography was not so named until 1977, it seems likely that as long as there has been literature, readers of such works have pondered literary geographies. “Where was that story set?” is a question that has drawn millions of people to travel and dozens of scholars to study literary geography. Indeed, the earliest works of literary geography in the United States and the United Kingdom generally set as their goals the answering of this question for various literary works; as early as 1907, geographers were attempting to map the areas described in literature.

Many literary geographers have believed that geographers' analyses could help to ground (and identify) the “real” roots of literary landscapes, even when those landscapes were expressed in highly symbolic fashion. Geographers have also seen literature as a source of geographic data and perceptions, preserving such information even from ancient times. Indeed, a special subfield of literary geography is engaged in the study of the Bible; scholars generally share the goal of using the Bible as a source of geographic information for the study of ancient Israel, and this highly specific focus has granted them a status separate from other geographers studying literature. But most literary geographers have concentrated on the “loftier” side of the canon; only more recently have scholars begun to examine works such as mysteries and science fiction.

In addition to identifying literary locations, another early emphasis was on how well particular works described the places where they (allegedly) were set and how well such writers interpreted their regions. Geographers looked to literature for evocative engagements with both physical–geographic and human– geographic phenomena—from hurricanes to house types—and then also sought to use such literature in the classroom. Novels became seen as a way in which to provide insights into landscape perception, into varying regions and the people who lived in them, and into physical processes on the earth's surface. Literature, in short, could be used as supplemental texts in geography classes—and it still is today.

Literary geographers have examined individual works, or the combined works of just one author, to explore how and why geography (or setting) is important in the plot or mood of the works and how the setting itself advances the plot. Some have been able to go beyond the identification of “actual” places where literary works were set to understand how some settings are in fact complex composites of multiple times and multiple places (both real and imagined), forged in the writers' minds and representing only part of what other viewers of the same settings might see. They have understood, for example, how landscapes in literature can transcend their simple roles as settings to be used powerfully as metaphors and symbols.

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