Gender and Literary Geography

The authors' analysis of over 20,000 books published in Britain between 1800 and 2009 compares the geographic attention of fiction authored by women and by men; of books that focus on female and male characters; and of works published in different eras. They find that, while there were modest differences in geographic attention in books by male and female authors, there were dramatic geographic differences in books with highly gendered character-space. Counter to expectation, the geographic differences between male and female characters were remarkably stable across these centuries. The authors also examine and complicate the power attributed to separate-sphere ideology, and demonstrate a surprising reversal of critical expectation: in fiction, natural spaces were more strongly associated with men, while urban spaces were more aligned with women. As it uncovers patterns in literary history, this Element casts new light on well-known texts and reimagines literature's broader engagement with gender and geography.