In these three works, fraught mobilities, precarious senses of belonging, and alternative social forms emerge and recede against the backdrop of a homogenizing yet nonhomogeneous United States. Informed by sociological theory (Christopher C. Apap) and geographical theory (Ann Brigham and David J. Alworth), these monographs share a concern with the literary production of sociospatial forms, particularly in their attention to both nondominant and dominant constructions or what might be called a long history of imagining space otherwise.
In The Genius of Place, Apap considers the centrality of the “geographical imagination—the ways that humans view, represent, and interpret spaces both actual and imagined” in the “development of sectionalism and nationalism” between 1816 (after the War of 1812) and 1836 (the annus mirabilis, the author notes, of transcendentalism) (3). Apap investigates the strategies authors developed to bring coherence to a “geographically inchoate nation” (15) and to address the political, racial, and...
