The Genius of Place: The Geographic Imagination in the Early Republic by Christopher C. Apap (review)

The first chapter of Christopher Apap's The Genius of Place: The Geographic Imagination in the Early Republic usefully identifies four discourses that showcase a fundamental shift in Jacksonian America's understanding of space and its reorientation after the War of 1812 from the global to the local: geographical textbooks and classroom instruction; the picturesque as an aesthetic mode; the travel industry and the rise of travel writing; and reconsiderations of the colonial past (24-25). Rooted in these perspectival shifts, Apap performs a series of illuminating close readings of the "sectional" imaginary in novels, sermons, and political speeches beginning in 1816 and concluding with the publication of Ralph Waldo Emerson's Nature in 1836. This twenty-year span produces "an imaginative literature deeply invested in consolidating sectional identity" (10). We discover how the picturesque in Catharine Maria Sedgwick's Redwood (1824) enlarges a sectional New England locality as a means of composing national union, and the ways in which James Fenimore Cooper's use of the picturesque mode informs the collective pursuit of shared goals by "sectional representatives" in the Middle States (81). From there, Apap turns to geographical space in Daniel Webster's "Second Reply" to Senator Robert Hayne during the South Carolina nullification crisis, a speech reliant on a sectional rhetoric that posits New England as a model for the nation against the South's short sightedness. Because of the South's latitudinal orientation, it fails to "see" the North and thus the true vision of nationhood.

Elsewhere, the sectional impulse in southern sketches and historical romances by John Pendleton Kennedy and William Gilmore Simms remaps generic conventions into a distinct literature of the South. Writers out of the Mississippi River valley like Daniel Drake employ a similar creative methodology to articulate the West as distinct, yet fundamental, to a cohesive national body. At this point, Apap does well to reaffirm his argument, which is not to recreate another scholarly portrait of a unified national imaginary that adheres, despite its political and cultural differences, but rather to emphasize the extent to which cultural productions of the era reify those differences through the articulation of sectional identities. At the same time, such expressions argue for their respective section's essential purpose in notions of nationhood. The final two chapters, then, extend those readings to the work of William Apess and David Walker in the context of Indian and African-American emplacement. During a period when a "national spatial imagination" (189) reflected a determination to remove racial difference from within its parameters, Apess and Walker strategically utilize a sectional logic to argue for sovereignty and belonging.

The book concludes with an insightful coda on Ralph Waldo Emerson, whose early expressions of local prejudice remind us of his place as both a revolutionary figure in the American literary tradition, and a product of "the sectional consolidation and calcification in the 1820's" (209). Indeed, there is much to admire in Apap's dynamic argument, which is consistently well researched in its focus on expressions of the sectional as a feature tenet of the geographic imagination in Jacksonian America. In particular, the close readings of lesser-known authors and texts provide the teacher and scholar an opportunity to reconsider the scope and complexities of a sometimes-overlooked period in American literary history.