Martin Brückner

In this book I tell the story of the geographic revolution in early America. The book’s aims are twofold: first, it recovers how maps and geography books were a pervasive genre and a constitutive part of what we generally call early American literature; second, it explores how popular geographic literacy influenced literary forms and the expression of identity from the 1680s to the 1820s. In contrast to traditional views according to which geography is understood mostly as a context, I historicize the discourse of geography as a textual form complete with its own mode of rhetoric, signs, and writing system (after all, geography literally meant “to write the earth”). I describe an array of geographical writings that include property plats and surveying manuals, decorative wall maps and school geographies, the nation’s first atlases and sentimental objects such as needlework samplers. By establishing geography as a basic form of literacy in early America, I am able to analyze the relationship of geography to the broader literary culture. In particular I examine the links between geographic literacy and period literature that includes poems and political speeches, diaries and novels. Ultimately, by using empirical historical evidence and critical close-reading, I am able to reconstruct a widespread culture of “geographical feeling” in which early Americans from the ordinary school girl to the exceptional statesmen built their future around a fundamental belief in territorial selfhood.

American Literary Geographies:  Spatial Practice and Cultural Production, 1500-1900. Essay collection co-edited with Hsuan L. Hsu (Newark: University of Delaware Press, forthcoming)

This interdisciplinary collection of essays explores intersections between geography and American literary history from the earliest geographic chronicles of the New World to the massive geopolitical imaginings of the 1890s.  By foregrounding the unsteady nature of geographical boundaries, the physical and imaginary migrations that coexisted with literary nationalism and the changing attitudes towards geographical settings, the essays in American Literary Geographies present textual, theoretical, and contextual alternatives to existing exceptionalist accounts of U.S. culture. Beginning with studies of the establishment of names, borders and jurisdictions, the collection builds towards materialist readings of literary settings illuminated by maps, surveying tracts, travelogues, sailors’ epitaphs, and various forms of racialized or gendered mobility. The focus on the literary and geographical discourse addresses more than social and political developments like imperialism, regionalism, and tourism; rather, this volume seeks to supplement literary histories by emphasizing spatial over temporal strategies as the organizing principle for telling the story of American literature.