Gender and Literary Geography

20,000 books. 200 years. Worldwide range. An exploration of gender and literary space at unprecedented scale.

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