Mapping with Words: Anglo-Canadian Literary Cartographies, 1789–1916 by Sarah Wylie Krotz (review)

Where is here? This study of Anglo-Canadian settler writing provides one answer: here 'is laden with the encounters, negotiations, and contest over land that animated colonial Canada' (p. 151). In this elegantly written book, Krotz explores the relationship between lines on maps and lines of text, arguing that much settler writing might be seen as 'an extension of the colonial maps upon which emigrants depended' (p. 4). Krotz constructs her argument through six chapter-length close readings of eight colonial texts, supplemented by ten rather shadowy maps, drawing on a rich context of interdisciplinary research by scholars like D.M.R. Bentley, W.H. New, Germaine Warkentin, and Margery Fee. Comprising poetry, travel narratives, a pioneer memoir and natural history, these writings cover 127 years of colonial expansion, highlighting the complexities, ambivalences and contradictions of colonisation, giving us a textual map of the colonial cartographic imagination.

The study begins with two long poems, Abram's Plains (1789) and Talbot Road (1818), which demonstrate the link between writing the landscape and mapping it as British colonial territory–one published in Quebec after the conquest of New France and the other celebrating a new network of roads in south-western Ontario. Both are survey poems with strong territorial imperatives, projecting Canada not as alien wilderness but as mappable space available for settlement, erasing the claims of Indigenous and French inhabitants with new visions of commercial progress. Against these masculinist models of colonial geography are women's micro-mappings of the domestic realities of pioneer life, in Susanna Moodie's Roughing It in the Bush (1852) and Catharine Parr Traill's botanical writings. (Krotz does not mention her Female Emigrant's Guide.) As alternative negotiations of colonial space, Moodie emphasises the messy incompleteness and dangers of wilderness settlement, while Traill mourns the destruction of the wilderness and its Indigenous inhabitants. However, both women are complicit in the very processes of colonisation. Inevitably, it is the male panoramic vision which dominates–in George Monro Grant's Ocean to Ocean: Sandford Fleming's Expedition through Canada in 1872 (1873) following the survey route for the proposed CPR railway, 'the first book … to envisage the country as a Dominion from sea to sea' (p. 18), and in D.C. Scott's poem 'The Height of Land' (1916), written ten years after Treaty 9 with the Ojibway and Cree of northern Ontario. Scott helped to negotiate that imperialist takeover, though as a poet he was haunted by Indigenous presences which treaties could not eradicate. Krotz's shrewdly deconstructive readings alert us to the subtexts here, which unsettle any confident imposition of order and ownership, revealing 'the tangled history of colonial appropriation' (p. 133).

Fittingly, Krotz concludes with reference to that early nineteenth-century fur trader, cartographer and settler David Thompson, whose Travels were not published until 1916, a hundred years after his death. Thompson's narrative, with his meticulous maps of the North West and his wealth of 'regional vignettes' of Indigenous peoples, provides a fascinating vision of the complex resonances 'in the discursive claiming of settler space' (p. 167). This book is a five-star addition to studies in Canadian literary geography.