Geography and the Production of Space in Nineteenth-Century American Literature

This book examines how literature represents different kinds of spaces, from the single-family home to the globe.

Hsuan L. Hsu (Author)

9780521197069, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 6 May 2010

270 pages
23.1 x 15.5 x 2.3 cm, 0.57 kg

In Geography and the Production of Space in Nineteenth-Century American Literature Hsuan L. Hsu examines how literature represents different kinds of spaces ranging from the single-family home to the globe. He focuses on authors such as Charles Brockden Brown, Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville and Sarah Orne Jewett, who drew on literary tools such as rhetoric, setting, and point of view to mediate between individuals and different kinds of spaces. These authors used forms such as the regional sketch, the domestic novel, and the detective story to re-examine how local spaces and communities would change when incorporated into global economic and political networks. Geography and the Production of Space in Nineteenth-Century American Literature is valuable reading for American literature scholars, and for all concerned with intersections between literature and geography.

Acknowledgments
Introduction: scales of identification
1. Democratic expansionism, gothic geographies, and Charles Brockden Brown
2. Urban apartments, global cities: the enlargement of private space in Poe and James
3. Cultural orphans: domesticity, missionaries, and China from Stowe to Sui Sin Far
4. 'The Checkered Globe': cosmopolitan despair in the American Pacific
5. Literature and regional production
Epilogue: scales of resistance.

Subject Areas: Literary studies: fiction, novelists & prose writers [DSK], Literary theory [DSA]