Mapping modernism: Connections between cartography and *literature.

Abstract

My dissertation investigates an unexamined issue in literary studies---the role of maps in modernist literature. As modernist writers searched for ways to express changing and sometimes contradictory perspectives on physical and mental experiences, they repeatedly turned to maps as both authoritative and problematic forms of representation and navigation. I argue that these maps---whether they appear as images described in the text, the subject of a poem's meditations, or actual sketches included in a book---act as interpretive nodes that allow insight into an issue central to much early twentieth-century literature: the orientation of the modern subject. Literature's turn to cartography can be seen as part of a formal project to explore and chart a comprehensive modern ontology at a time of technological advances, national and colonial upheaval, and a transformed understanding of human psychology. Breaking original critical ground, I argue that the acts of map reading and map-making in literature are integrally connected to the modernist search for new orders and modes of representation. I engage in historicized readings of literature and maps as well as with questions of poetic, narrative, and cartographic structure. I look at World War I trench maps and texts by Ford Madox Ford and David Jones in order to argue that the destruction of land produces a radically unfamiliar experience of space and necessitates a new literary form to represent that space. Shifting my focus, I examine the regional survey movement in Britain in conjunction with texts by Hardy, Forster, and Auden. I then explore the development of this regionalism in the United States through an examination of Sherwood Anderson's writing, contrasting it to Gertrude Stein's map-like vision of the nation and of literature. Returning to the British scene, I probe the geographic theory of the 'closed world' and the destabilization of the imperial world map in works by Kipling, Conrad, and Graham Greene. In my conclusion, I read poems of the Spanish Civil War, which reveal, I argue, a crisis of spatial representation that is the harbinger of another upheaval in literary representation, soon to be intensified by the next world war.