UCLA

This dissertation examines nineteenth-century American literary writers’ critical engagements with and contributions to the production of geographical knowledge prior to the emergence of geography as a distinct modern discipline. Three writers who are now best known for their works of literature, Charles Brockden Brown, Margaret Fuller, and Emily Dickinson, each in their own way sought to redress problems of content and method that they identified in American geographical texts that proliferated in their milieux. In atlases, gazetteers, and geography textbooks, as well as in works of travel writing and nature essays, these writers found not just limited accounts of the country but also, more broadly, what they judged to be insufficient approaches to attaining, organizing, and communicating knowledge of the external world. Their varied writings—Brown’s periodical publications, Fuller’s travel writing, and Dickinson’s letters and poems—attest to and embody a rich repository of critical geographical discourse in nineteenth-century American letters that has been all but illegible to scholars of geography and literature alike. This dissertation highlights, and attempts to overcome, the structural differences between modern academic disciplines and nineteenth-century knowledge production that have made these writers’ engagements with geography—in the etymological sense of “earth-writing”—difficult to see, let alone appreciate and examine. In addition to expanding conceptions of the kind of work conducted by the individual writers discussed, this dissertation aims to model an approach to accessing, and assessing, the rich and varied economy of knowledge and knowledge production that they not only operated in but, through their acts of writing, brought into existence.