American Modernism and the Cartographic Imagination

This book examines American modernism as a mode of counter-mapping that contested the official geographies of US empire.

Aaron Nyerges (Author)

9781009515337, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 23 October 2025

264 pages
22.9 x 15.2 x 1.9 cm, 0.496 kg

This new reading of American modernism examines the cartographic literature of the United States and places it in context of the state's overseas expansion. It stretches the map of US literature across an imperial archipelago of territories, bringing canonical American authors into relation with writers who are comparatively under-represented in modernist studies. The book argues that literary artists from across US dominion responded to space-dominating technologies of empire and retooled them to imagine counter-cartographies, designs that challenged the official geographies of the United States.

Introduction: the logistics of counter-mapping
1. Maps from indigenous territory
2. An atlas of Energy poetics
3. Island Periploi
4. Stereophonic boundaries
5. Phantasmagorical terrain
Coda: the nation as it is not
Bibliography
Index.

Subject Areas: Literary studies: general [DSB]