UCLA UCLA Electronic Theses and Dissertations Title Literature and the Production of Geography in Nineteenth-Century America Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/2rs9p8n9 Author Rosson, Grant Matthew Publication Date 2020 Peer reviewed|Thesis/dissertation eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA Los Angeles Literature and the Production of Geography in Nineteenth-Century America A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English by Grant Matthew Rosson 2020 © Copyright by Grant Matthew Rosson 2020 ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION Literature and the Production of Geography in Nineteenth-Century America by Grant Matthew Rosson Doctor of Philosophy in English University of California, Los Angeles, 2020 Professor Christopher J. Looby, Chair 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 ii 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. iii The dissertation of Grant Matthew Rosson is approved. John A. Agnew Michael C. Cohen Sarah Tindal Kareem Christopher J. Looby, Committee Chair University of California, Los Angeles 2020 iv For my parents, with love and gratitude v TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS vii-viii VITA ix-x INTRODUCTION 1 CHAPTER ONE 33 “[T]he ground work of all knowledge”: Charles Brockden Brown’s Periodical Approach to American Geography CHAPTER TWO 91 “[T]o the Absent”: Margaret Fuller’s Communication of the American Country CHAPTER THREE 163 “We will talk over what we have learned in our geographies”: Emily Dickinson’s Geographical Discourse BIBLIOGRAPHY 213 vi ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I am grateful to my dissertation committee for giving so generously of their time, attention, and expertise as I went about putting this project together. I am grateful to John Agnew for offering the guidance and encouragement that made it imaginable to step out beyond the bounds of my own discipline. I am grateful to Sarah Kareem for the example of her own work, and for the suggestions and advice that helped shape mine. I am grateful to Michael Cohen for the many sharp questions and incisive comments, delivered with characteristic kindness, that helped me see new possibilities in my own work and in nineteenth-century literature alike. Finally, I am grateful to my committee chair, Chris Looby, whose scholarship, collegiality, and mentorship, as well as kindness, warmth, and understanding, inspired and sustained me from my first days at UCLA through every turn in my work and life since. With the deepest and sincerest gratitude, thank you. I would have had neither the strength nor the imagination to undertake this project, let alone complete it, had I not been sustained throughout by friends who enriched my life and work in at least equal measure. Will Clark, Angelina Del Balzo, Kim Hedlin, and Sujin Youn kept me in the kind of food, drink, hikes, and conversation that I came to consider necessary complements to academic life. Ben Beck, Dan Couch, Sam Sommers, and Jordan Wingate, in addition to all of the above, taught me more than I can say about everything that matters, in life, work, and otherwise. They are impressed in every one of these pages, and will be in everything I do hereafter, whatever it may be. James Reeves set an example of generosity, integrity, and wit, not to mention productivity, that I have long since given up trying to emulate. As long as he continues to read and comment on my work, and send me his latest, in whatever medium, I will count myself luckier than I deserve. Jay Jin and Sarah Nance offered regular and welcome reminders that I had more to do than read and write academic prose. Not the least of their numerous and splendid gifts is their willingness to share with me their poetry and their friendship. Dearest of friends and colleagues, thank you. I am grateful to the faculty, staff, and students of the UCLA English Department whose many kindnesses and acts of assistance helped me navigate the graduate program, and made doing so a particular joy. I am especially grateful in this regard to Helen Deutsch, Jonathan Post, Marissa López, Brian Kim Stefans, Chris Mott, Jeanette Gilkison, and Mike Lambert. I am grateful to the organizers and regular participants of the Americanist Research Colloquium, where I was fortunate to receive feedback on a portion of my chapter on Margaret Fuller. I am especially grateful to Joe Dimuro, Carrie Hyde, Christian Reed, and Bert Emerson. For their encouragement and support over the years, I am grateful to the board and members of the Emily Dickinson International Society. Martha Nell Smith, Alex Socarides, Eliza Richards, Faith Barrett, Jane Wald, Páraic Finnerty, Renée Bergland, Marianne Noble, Marta Werner, Karah Mitchell, Clare Mullaney, Mary Traester, Christa Holm Vogelius, and many more, shared, conversed, and listened in ways that deepened and enlivened my appreciation of Dickinson’s writing. I am especially grateful to Michelle Kohler for helping me bring clarity and focus to my work on Dickinson’s geographic poems, and for giving me a reason to include them in this project in the first place. vii For sharing with me rich resources on the periodical publications of Charles Brockden Brown, and for encouraging my work on them, I am grateful to Matthew Pethers. Special thanks are due to Felicity Nussbaum, whose gracious support and expert advice over two summers helped me begin to explore my questions and observations about literature and space. Her wisdom and care are built into the very foundations of this project. At a somewhat greater remove, I am grateful to my many teachers at the University of Virginia whose dedication and concern for thought shaped my path in more ways than they likely know. I am particularly grateful to Kevin Seidel, whose early encouragement suggested that I could do this kind of thing; to Chip Tucker, who urged me take the long view and consider it with care; and to Jerome McGann, who, with patience and attention beyond reckoning, showed me where to begin and how. “To thank you, baffles me.” More recently, I am grateful for the welcome and support I have received from colleagues and friends at Vilnius University, especially Linara Bartkuvienė, Rūta Šlapkauskaitė, Jolanta Šinkūnienė, Deividas Zibalas, Eimantė Liubertaitė, and Davide Castiglione. Through all of this, I have been blessed with support without limit, qualification, or question from my family and friends. I am grateful to my Los Angeles family—Chris, Amanda, Anna, and Tessa, Eric and Maureen—for sharing with me their city, their home, their table, and much more besides, with warmth and love. I am grateful to Christina Joo and Ian Hickox, for visits, excursions, phone calls, and texts when I needed them most. For being there, wherever there happened to be, I am grateful to Courtney Kampa, Sarah Elaine Hart and Patrick Higgins (and, lately, Orion), Tara Sheehan and Tim Sharkey, and Dan and Jackie Rausa. My greatest thanks are due, always, to my family. To my father, Scott Rosson, who read every word, every time, and to my mother, Erin Rosson, who taught me how to find the courage write them in the first place. To David, Aušra, Eva, and Lukas, Evan and Lindsey, for being constants in friendship, love, and support, and for not asking too many times when I would be finished with this. To Rima Matukonienė and Rolandas Matukonis, whose kindness and welcome have so greatly expanded my notions of home and family. And to Rūta, Ąžuolas, and Max, who found me in the middle of this and have carried me since, with patience and goodwill, unearned and never wanting. Forever yours, in love and gratitude. viii VITA Education 2016 C. Phil., English, University of California, Los Angeles 2014 M.A., English, University of California, Los Angeles 2010 B.A. with High Distinction, English, University of Virginia Publications “Dickinson’s Geographic Poetics,” in The New Emily Dickinson Studies. ed. Michelle Kohler. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (2019). Reviews Review of Whitman & Dickinson: A Colloquy, ed. Éric Athenot and Cristanne Miller. Women’s Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal 47, no. 3 (April 2018). Review of Excursions with Thoreau: Philosophy, Poetry, Religion, by Edward F. Mooney. Thoreau Society Bulletin (Spring 2017).