Geography: Chapter 19

"And we feel that those novels and stories couldn't be set anywhere but where they are, that those characters couldn't say thee things the say if were uprooted and planted in, say, Minnesota or Scotland. They'd say differnt things and preform different acts...So What's geography? Rivers, hills, valley, buttes, steppes, glaciers, swamps, mountains, prairies, chasms seas, islands, people. In poetry and fiction, it may be mostly people."

Geography develops literature. Geography is single handily the most important element in a piece of work. Geography is the combination of the “hills, creeks, deserts, beaches, degrees latitude,” economics, politics and humans that inhabit the area. The location in which a story’s setting takes place defines and develops the characters. For instance a person from Scotland will say different sayings and act certain ways compared to some on from Texas or in the Middle East. Writers understand that readers place stereotypes on a character when they are from a particular location. They use this as leverage in their stories when creating their characters. Geography frequently plays “quite specific plot role in a literary work.” When a character travels to different geography it can be faced with certain restraints common to that location. Such as in A Room with a View the main character Lucy Honeychurch travels to Florence where she must lose her “racially inherited stiffness. Finding her racial freedom stems from the “fiery nature of the Italian City.” Florence allows for this transformation to happen exemplifying how geography can play a precise plot role in a piece of work. Foster implies that writers send characters to different settings “because they are having direct, raw encounters with the subconscious.” Writers employ geography as a simple metaphor for the psyche. He illustrates that when characters are sent south is usually for the digging deep into their subconscious to take place. The geography of a warmer climate and sunshine influences new self expression from characters within a piece of literature. Poetry also has a strong grasp on geography. They are able to employ the beauty of a certain location. However they are also able to apply this to unspecific regions such as desert, never stating which desert in particular but just deserts as an overall theme.