Cartographers as Critics: Staking Claims in the Mapping of American Literature

“Cartographers as Critics: Staking Claims in the Mapping of American Literature” recuperates the print culture phenomenon of literary map production, which became popular in North America around 1898. A literary map can be defined as any pictorial map that depicts imaginative worlds or authorial associations across geopolitical space. While notable examples have circulated for centuries in bound books, such as Thomas More’s _Utopia_ and William Faulkner’s _Absalom, Absalom!_, the majority of twentieth-century literary maps were ephemeral productions that have not survived in great numbers. These discursive documents functioned as compelling expressions of literary taste and cultural values; they circulated in magazines and newspapers, as gas station promotional giveaways and diner placemats, and as classroom “equipment.” Extant literary maps offer new perspectives on turn-of-the-twentieth century U.S. literary nationalism and the Public Library Movement, “fiction debates” and “Great Books” curriculums, the mid-century schism between anthropological folklorists and literary folklorists, and the role of popular cartography in U.S. print culture. Though today’s critics are generally unaware of the literary maps discussed here, these documents are consequential artifacts that have consistently equated canonized writers with pioneers and conquerors; in doing so, they have formulated literature as an extractable, finite, and controllable resource found on North America’s “literary frontiers.” Importantly, discursive literary maps make claims that are both critical assessments and assertions of territorial title. In doing so, they impose a cartographic framework on Native space that simultaneously evacuates and denies both the presence and possibility of Indigenous literatures. “Cartographers as Critics” seeks to problematize this ideological equation and to explore its critical implications for the recent “spatial turn” in the humanities and social sciences, as well as the burgeoning revitalization of literary map production and circulation now present on the Internet.Ph