Nineteenth-Century Geographies
Nineteenth-Century Geographies
The Transformation of Space from the Victorian Age to the American Century
The nineteenth century was a time of unprecedented discovery and exploration throughout the globe, a period when the “blank spaces” of the earth were systematically investigated, occupied, and exploited by the major imperial powers of Western Europe and the United States. The lived experience of space was also changing in dramatic ways for people as a result of new developments in technology, communication, and transportation. As a result, the century was characterized by a new and intense interest in place, both local and global.
The collection is comprised of seventeen essays from various disciplines organized into four areas of geographic concern. The first, “Time Zones,” examines several ways that place gets expressed as time during the period, how geography becomes history. A second grouping, “Commodities and Exchanges,” explores the role of geographic origin as it was embodied in particular objects, from the souvenir map to imported tea. The set of essays on “Domestic Fronts” moves the discussion from the public to the private sphere by looking at how domestic space became defined in terms of its boundary with the foreign. The final section, “Orientations,” takes up the changing relations of bodies, identities, and the spaces they inhabit and through which they moved. The collection as a whole also traces the development of the discipline of geography with its different institutional and political trajectories in the United States and Great Britain.
Ronald R. Thomas is a professor of English at Trinity College (Connecticut). He has written several books on Victorian culture, including Detective Fiction and the Rise of Forensic Science.
Mapping the orient: non-western modernization, imperialism, and the end of romanticism / Ussama Makdisi
"Water leaves no trail ": mapping away the vanishing American in Cooper's Leatherstocking tales / David C. Lipscomb
Mapping enterprise: cartography and commodification at the 1893 World Columbian Exposition / Diane Dillon
'A typically English brew": tea drinking, tourism, and imperialism in Victorian England / Julie Fromer
Cultural ecologies of the coast: space as the edge of cultural practice in Mary Kingsley travels hi- West Africa / Jules Law
Jewish geography: Trollope and the question of style / Joseph Iitvak
When in Rome: honeymoon tourism in the "city of visible history" / Helena Michie
Erotic geographies: sex and the managing of colonial space / Philippa Levine
Confinements and liberations: inscribing "woman" in colonial geographies of power / Betty Joseph
Literacy or empire: the ABCs of geography and the rule of territoriality in early-nineteenth-century America / Martin Brückner
From house to square to street: narrative traversals / Robert L. Patten
Those "gorgeous incongruities": polite politics and public space on the streets of nineteenth-century New York / Mona Domosh
Dickensian dislocations: trauma, memory, and railway disaster / Jill L. Matus
Poetics on the line: the effect of mass transport in urban culture / Ana Vadillo
"Full of empty": creating the southwest as "terra incognita" / Mary Pat Brady
Empire's second take: projecting American Stanley and Livingstone / Jon Hegglund
