This book examines the intersections between literary modernism and historical forms of geographical thinking from the late nineteenth century to the late 1940s. The central argument is that the dominant geographic paradigms in this period enabled and made legible for Walt Whitman, Langston Hughes, Gertrude Stein, and H.D. outward-facing forms of global geography. Reconstructing the conditions of reading, influence, and intervention in which literary modernism and geographical knowledge co-evolved offers a new context for and vantage of global poetry produced by Americans. The interest in glob ... More

This book examines the intersections between literary modernism and historical forms of geographical thinking from the late nineteenth century to the late 1940s. The central argument is that the dominant geographic paradigms in this period enabled and made legible for Walt Whitman, Langston Hughes, Gertrude Stein, and H.D. outward-facing forms of global geography. Reconstructing the conditions of reading, influence, and intervention in which literary modernism and geographical knowledge co-evolved offers a new context for and vantage of global poetry produced by Americans. The interest in global connection and comparison found in academic and popular geography presented modernism with formal logics of spatial comparison, homology, and transitivity capable of bringing together disparate locales from distant global addresses. At the same time, modernism undermined the ontological fixity of space that geography held dear. Geography and modernism can thus be seen not only as structural analogues for each other but as multiple voices contributing to a common conversation about the nature of the relationship between society and the environment, how we navigate units of scale (region, nation, transnation, globe), and the cultural, national, and racial politics of how we orient ourselves on the globe. Poetic form in this sense becomes a global form—a form of geography—that destabilizes national distinctions and binaries such as West/non-West and imperial center/colonial periphery.