Includes bibliographical references (pages 223-236) and index.
Contents:
Conclusion: Maps and counter-maps (on getting lost). 1. Illuminating the horizon : the cartographic aesthetics of two early long poems -- 2. Land up close : mapping disorder in 'Roughing it in the Bush' -- 3. Intimate geography of wilderness : the spatiality of Catharine Parr Traill's botanical inventories -- 4. Writing and reading the Northwest : George Monro Grant and the palimpsest of settler space -- 5. Poet in Treaty territory : the literary cartography of "the height of land" -- Conclusion: Maps and counter-maps (on getting lost).
Summary:
Mapping with Words re-conceptualizes settler writing as literary cartography. The topographical descriptions of early Canadian settler writers generated not only picturesque and sublime landscapes, but also verbal maps. These worked to orient readers, reinforcing and expanding the cartographic order of the emerging colonial dominion. Drawing upon the work of critical and cultural geographers as well as literary theorists, Sarah Wylie Krotz opens up important aesthetic and political dimensions of both familiar and obscure texts from the nineteenth century, including Thomas Cary's Abram's Plains, George Monro Grant's Ocean to Ocean, and Susanna Moodie's Roughing it in the Bush. Highlighting the complex territoriality that emerges from their cartographic aesthetics, Krotz offers fresh readings of these texts, illuminating their role in an emerging spatial imaginary that was at once deeply invested in the production of colonial spaces and at the same time enmeshed in the realities of confronting Indigenous sovereignties.
This resource is supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services under the provisions of the Library Services and Technology Act as administered by State Library of Iowa.