When the first edition of Cyclopedia of Literary Places was published in 2003, it was the third Salem Press title-driven reference literary book, following Master plots and Cyclopedia of Literary Characters . These titles provided comprehensive analyses of classic texts in terms of their stories, their characters, and their settings [ed.].... Although there are a great many literary surveys cataloging and analyzing stories and a considerable number cataloging and analyzing literary characters, there are only a few that attempt to tackle the third element of the natural triumvirate—place—and those few adopt an approach and a system of organization quite different from the one employed here.
It would be unlikely to occur to a literary historian to begin a study of plots by cataloging and categorizing events in the real world with which various authors might have had some acquaintance, then examining literary works as modified representations of those events. Nor would a student of literary characterization commence the project by compiling the biographies of real individuals known to various authors, then proceeding to an analysis, the means by which those biographies had been adapted to produce fictional individuals. Why, then, do the majority of reference books that deal with settings in literature model themselves on gazetteers, listing the real places with which writers were familiar, and then pointing out—sometimes in a rather desultory manner—which of their published works were set in approximately similar locations?
Literary Geography
Whatever the reason, the fact is that the fugitive field of “literary geography” has always been primarily concerned with analyzing the relationships between writers and the places in which they write, and only secondarily with the processes of filtration that the authors apply in moving those actual places into naturalistic fictions. The dealings of writers with wholly invented settings has always taken third place, with the result that even reference books that deal exclusively with places that do not exist—of which The Dictionary of Imaginary Places (1980; rev. ed. 1999), by Alberto Manguel and Gianni Guadalupi, is the most prominent example—tend to follow the pattern of a tourist guide rather than the kind of text-by-text analysis presented in Cyclopedia of Literary Places .
The book that first laid down the conventional pattern of the literary tourist-guide was Literary Geography (1904), by William Sharp, which collected a series of essays from The Pall Mall Magazine . Sharp apologized in his introduction for the limitations of his patchwork, noting that its omissions would not be made good until someone took the trouble to compile a Cyclopedia of Literary Geography . No one was in any hurry to attempt anything so comprehensive, and it is arguable that no one has ever done a thorough job of it; however, Sharp would surely have been glad to recognize The Oxford Literary Guide to the British Isles (1977), by Dorothy Eagle and Hilary Carnell, as the kind of thing he had in mind.
Sharp's essays deal with the literary works of seven individual writers and one close-knit family, and four geographical locales of varying magnitude. The perennial focus of his attention is the manner in which real landscapes are translated into fictional ones by a process of careful selection and metaphorical illumination. His analyses examine both the methods of literary reference by which the naming of landmarks and a few carefully culled details combine to create the impression of a whole landscape, and the closely related methods by which key aspects of the areas thus put in place are “highlighted” with particular narrative significance. This metamorphic process fascinated Sharp, as it had fascinated others before him. Although the pleasures of wordplay enabled Sharp to deal particularly extravagantly with the relationship between the “Scott-Land” of Sir Walter Scott and the Scotland of history and geography, his most penetrating analysis was that of “Dickens-Land.”
The unique imaginative authority of Charles Dickens's representations of English life—which licensed the widespread use of the adjective “Dickensian”—was celebrated twenty years before the publication of Sharp's book by Joris-Karl Huysmans in Against the Grain (1884; English translation, 1922), whose hero, Jean des Esseintes, is seized by a fervent desire to visit Dickensian London but realizes after a brief visit to what would now be called a “theme pub” that it is an artifact of the imagination that had better remain unclouded by comparisons with actual streets and buildings. Des Esseintes was right, of course, but he was not entirely right, as Sharp took care to point out in another of his essays, “The Brontë Country.” In that essay, Sharp observed that there is a part of northern England that really had become “Brontë Country” by the end of the nineteenth century—thanks to the sheer mass of American tourists flocking to it. The actual focal point of this literary pilgrimage was, of course, the parsonage where Charlotte, Emily, and Anne Brontë lived and wrote; however, there was a sense in which the entire surrounding landscape was, for the tourists, both informed and transformed by the representations of it in the Brontës’ novels, Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights ,and The Tenant of Wild fell Hall . Brontë CoThere is alsountry is, for this reason, rather different from England's other major location of nineteenth-century literary tourism, Stratford-upon-Avon, which was merely the birthplace of William Shakespeare, never a setting in any of his plays. The real landscape of the moors surrounding Haworth is nowadays seen through the lenses of the Brontë sisters’ literary imagination— a visionary process that automatically edits out such modern embellishments as the vanes and pylons of the nearby wind farm.
The important lesson to be learned from Sharp's pioneering textbook—and especially from its observations on Brontë country—is that literary geography involves a curious admixture of conservation and transformation. Literary geography, even as practiced in America, is uniquely preoccupied with the British Isles because the isles have generated a great deal of both history and literature. The lenses provided by British literature transform British landscapes, but they transform them in order to preserve them as they once were—or, to be strictly accurate, as they once seemed . It is the literary geography of England—not the actual landscape—which makes England seem forever quaint, especially to American eyes—an illusion to which the actual landscape panders, merchandising its quaintness in the names as well as the stock of shops, parks, and public houses.
The process of transformation that began in Great Britain has spread to other European countries, the volume of coverage roughly equating to the volume of tourism attracted by the various nations. It is for this reason that the most important predecessor acknowledged by the compilers of The Oxford Literary Guide to the British Isles is Margaret Crosland's A Traveller's Guide to Literary Europe (1965), which devotes one volume to the British Isles and one to the rest of Europe. It was the strength of this publishing tradition that persuaded Manguel and Guadalupi to compile their satirical Dictionary of Imaginary Places for armchair tourists, although their survey might have produced more interesting revelations had they undertaken it in a slightly less frivolous spirit. Many “guide-books” of this kind have been devoted to the work of individual writers, sometimes to individual books. Some of these guides are very earnest indeed, even when they deal with imaginary settings. Robert Foster's The Complete Guide to Middle-Earth (1978; rev. ed. 2001) is a good example—but the lack of any general and comparative dimension sets a severe limit to the potential achievements of such texts. Cyclopedia of Literary Places is therefore a vital contribution to the repair of this deficit.
It is a mistake to see the transfiguration of real settings by the literary imagination as a trivial matter. As Oscar Wilde pointed out, life imitates art more assiduously than art imitates life, and it is arguable that we cannot see landscapes as “landscapes” or settings as “settings” until we look at them with eyes informed by art. Moreover, once we have seen them in that way, it is difficult indeed to see them in any other way. Theme parks are the most obvious large-scale manifestations of our ongoing attempts to remake actual environments in the image of fictions, but they are the ostentatious tip of a much more extensive iceberg. There are very few real places named after novels, although the Devon, England, resort of Westward Ho! even retained Charles Kingsley's exclamation mark, but there are a great many places whose existing names have been modified in significance by famous literary works set therein. For example, few visitors to Paris can look at Notre Dame Cathedral for the first time without thinking about a hunchbacked bell-ringer, even if they have never read Victor Hugo.
Maps and Spatial Relationships
It is easy to forget how recently maps of the world became objective to any real degree, and how much fiction is still contained in two-dimensional representations. We have all become used to the global representation of the world, which accurately represents the outlines of the continents even if their multicolored divisions are products of the political imagination. However, it was not so long ago that the majority of people thought that the earth was as flat as most of its maps. Mercator projections, which stretch actual geography into rectangular frames with the equator as their central baselines, also split the world in two so that west becomes left and east becomes right. The selection of the Greenwich meridian as a center was a hard-fought political contest that is by no means conclusively won even in Europe.
The first maps of the world—as opposed to navigational charts, which were primarily diagrams of the sea in which coastlines were walls with “port-holes” and islands were either oases or hazards—were Medieval “mappemondes” like the famous mappa mundi . They were usually circular, often centered on Jerusalem or Rome (for religious reasons), and sometimes featured land masses subtly distorted by artists to suggest recognizable shapes—faces, perhaps, or symbolic apples. Their example reminds us that “the world” is itself an imaginative construct, whose meaning and connotations are remarkably elastic. The negotiations regarding that meaning and its implications have always been partly conducted in and considerably influenced by literary works, and even the simplest terms generated by the logic of map-construction have acquired additional meanings reflected in and modified by literary consciousness.
The most elementary theoretization of living-space is the establishment of coordinates. East and west are given to us by the rising and setting of the sun (with appropriate latitudinal adjustments), north and south by a logical derivation that was marvelously endorsed by the magnetic compass. In every location, however, these four terms take on additional meanings. The history and geography of the United States of America are partly defined by the special meanings attached to the West and the South—notions so powerful that they have reduced their opposites to almost entirely negative connotations (East is usually “back East,” and North is rarely cited outside the context of the Civil War, in which it designates that region against which the South rebelled).
West and South are so fully loaded with meaning in America that they have spawned such subcategories as “Midwest” and “Deep South.” They also crop up in descriptive phrases such as “Wild West” and “Southern Gothic.” The spirit of America's own West is also carried over into the much grander version of the “West” that distinguishes the primary political products of the Industrial Revolution from the “East” and the “Third World.” Britain, by contrast, is socially organized mainly along a north-south axis, the north of England being industrialized, provincial, and relatively poor, with Scotland lying even farther to the north. Although Wales is in the west, and Ireland even farther west, the notion of “westernness” in Britain has been almost completely taken over by the lands that lie beyond the Atlantic horizon. Throughout Europe the “East” is usually “mysterious,” and the Orient has a particular resonance in the literature of France, many of whose most famous writers undertook actual journeys there in search of fuel for their imagination.
The implications of these meanings—and their equivalents in Eastern Europe, Asia, South America and so on—can be found in hundreds of the analyses presented in Cyclopedia of Literary Places and are sketchily present even in the contents page. For instance, two different books discussed in these pages that are called North and South embody very different notions of the symbolism of those descriptions. There is also an Eastward Ho!, as well as a Westward Ho!, anepic The Journey to the West , as well as a symbolic one that leads East of Eden . There is also a war novel set on a “Western Front,” where all is ironically quiet, as well as a “Western World” ironically inhabited by a playboy.
The metaphorical imagery of up and down also features elaborately in the geography of literary texts, where the ocean is often a surface overlaying abyssal depths, and the peaks of mountains point, in Olympian fashion, to the heavens. Subterranean caves and lofty towers reproduce a similar symbolism on a more limited scale, while attics and cellars are often deployed in such a way as to make the architecture of houses echo the anatomy of the human body or the imagined topography of a psyche in which high-minded reason struggles ceaselessly to suppress “baser” instincts and impulses. Within the world of literary geography, rising and falling are never simple matters, as The Rise of Silas Lapham and The Fall of the House of Usher readily illustrate.
Place in Novels
To some extent, the dearth of literary reference books that look at settings in the manner of Cyclopedia of Literary Places reflects the fact that novelists—unlike poets—are far less inclined to use entirely imaginary settings than they are to use entirely imaginary characters and entirely imaginary stories. Most “realistic” fictions are set in imaginary houses, but those imaginary houses are often placed along real streets, in real districts of real cities, or at least in real nations. That, after all, is how much of the “realism” of “realistic” fiction is derived. By contrast, wholly imaginary cities, nations, and worlds are, almost by definition, the provinces of Romance—it is not a coincidence that the contemporary reference book whose subject-matter and format are most closely akin to this one is the Dictionary of Literary Utopias compiled in 2000 by Vita Fortunati and Raymond Trousson.
It would be a mistake to judge that the reliance of literary realists on “real” settings makes their use of those settings any less artificial. Indeed, the construction of the environment of a story lies much closer to the heart of the creative enterprise than casual readers may suppose. The realism of character is only partly a matter of “literary psychology”; it is achieved on the page largely by demonstrating how characters reflect and embody those elements of their environment that have shaping influences upon them, and how they determine and decorate those aspects of the environment that they control. The realism of plot has little to do with matters of rational plausibility—the improbable is normal even in the most realistic fiction—and much to do with the efficient manipulation of settings and objects.
It is natural enough that “literary geography” should be so preoccupied by the relationships between the real and the imaginary—but the fact that so many of its productions should be restricted to the form of real and imaginary tourist guides does scant justice to the actual significance of setting within literary works, or to the subtleties of its manipulation.
Readers are by no means alone in taking settings too much for granted. Six fundamental questions of literary composition separate into three natural pairs: Where and when is the story happening? Who is it happening to and why do they care? What is the problem, and how are the characters going to tackle it? The first two questions are usually passed over in a cursory manner as mere matters of happenstance. Although writers are more evenly divided in their inclinations than readers—most of whom are interested in the story first, and after that, the characters—far fewer modern writers find their initial inspiration in place than in plot or character, although places played a far more significant inspirational role while poetry retained its dominance in the hierarchy of literary fashion.
Place in Dramatic Works
It is rare for novelists to organize their stories around particular places rather than networks of characters. Thornton Wilder's The Bridge of San Luis Rey (1927), which examines the lives of the people coincidentally present on the eponymous edifice at the moment of its collapse, seemed very unusual and quite original at the time of its publication. Although the necessities of stagecraft require play-wrights—and theatrical directors—to pay close attention to settings, the same necessities require that the main priority of that consideration should be economy. Aplay that moves through many scenes must represent each scene sketchily, because the scenery has to be shifted at every change. A play set against a single background must use that background to maximum effect, in that every object to be employed in the action must be present on the set, and—ideally, at least— every object that is present must have some significance to the story.
The principles of theatrical economy were carried over into the cinema and television, although the gradual sophistication of technology and methods has resulted in a conspicuous liberation, particularly in terms of the license granted to the movie camera to range far and wide across increasingly expansive landscapes. Although Cyclopedia of Literary Places is solely concerned with literary texts, this evolution of media is by no means irrelevant to its contents. In much the same way that our experience of real landscapes can be, and routinely is, informed by literary representations, so our experience of novels and plays can be, and routinely is, informed by film and television adaptations. Although many film adaptations attempt to re-create the settings of the original stories as faithfully as possible, a great deal of improvisation is required—and some film directors set out unrepentantly to reconfigure the settings of their raw material.
The value of a carefully designed standing set is very obvious in the television medium because of the domination of that medium by the series format. However, even in the world of series television there are relatively few shows in which settings are as important as generators of stories as relationships among regular cast members; the exceptions, significantly, usually feature “magical places” that have their own power to move events along. The same is true of those novels and short stories which, for one reason or another, closely confine their characters. The texts described in Cyclopedia of Literary Places in which places are more important than the characters who move within them, tend to use magical places, pregnant with mysterious forces. They are haunted , if not literally, then metaphorically.
Realism in Settings
This effect combines with the fundamental reliance of “realistic” texts on “real” settings to draw texts whose primary emphasis is on place, rather than plot or characters, away from the center of modern critical concern, often taking them across the boundary into the oft-despised genres of supernatural fiction. The more “realistic” settings are, the more settings tend to “fade into the background.” That “fading” process should not, however, be construed as a diminution of importance; it is precisely because backgrounds may be unobtrusive that they can do vital narrative labor in a subtle and ingenious manner.
Although it was natural for the series of literary reference works of which Cyclopedia of Literary Places is a part to produce analyses of plots first and then analyses of characters, there was still a great deal of useful work to be done—and useful insight to be gained—when those analyses had been completed. These volumes are particularly useful because this third-stage labor is so rarely attempted in other literary reference books.
In order to illustrate the results of this kind of literary dissection, it is necessary only to consider the book that is likely more familiar to readers than any other: the Bible. The Bible is easily representable as a set of stories which—like many other plots, but on a grander scale— begins with a Creation and ends, after much complication, with a final Revelation. Seen in terms of its characters, it begins with Adam and Eve and descends through Moses, Solomon, Job, Jesus, Saint Paul, and a host of others, to the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. Viewed from the perspective of geography, the Bible makes its way from Eden to Armageddon via such settings as Noah's Ark, Babylon, Sodom and Gomorrah, the Promised Land, the Walls of Jericho, a stable in Bethlehem, Golgotha, and the Road to Damascus. There is nothing “mere” about the decor of the Bible; every one of the mentioned locations is so fully laden with significance, thanks to its appearance in the Bible, that most of us carry them around with us constantly, as key reference points for the organization of our own experience. They retain such immense power as metaphors that references to them crop up, by necessity, in a large portion of the literary texts examined within Cyclopedia of Literary Places .
Journeys
The most elementary form of story is the journey— necessarily so, given that we can hardly help conceiving of human life as a journey from the cradle to the grave, in whose course we accumulate experiences and, we hope, make progress . One of the cornerstones of modern prose fiction is John Bunyan's account of life in Christendom as The Pilgrim's Progress (1678), in which every believer must make a way from the City of Destruction to the Celestial City, traversing a symbolic landscape strewn with such traps as the Slough of Despond, the Valley of Humiliation, Vanity Fair, and Doubting Castle. Like the Bible, Bunyan's book provided a stock of symbols on which later writers could draw, but—more important—it also provided a methodological example. Although allegory went out of fashion as a form in its own right, it remains fundamental to all literary endeavor, dissolved within the rich solution of narrative design.
The words “journey” and “pilgrimage” recur continually in the contents pages of Cyclopedia of Literary Places . Alongside such direct quotations as Vanity Fair , Bunyan's terminological method resounds in many other titles featured in these volumes, including Bleak House, Castle Rackrent, Heartbreak House and Nightmare Abbey; fainter echoes, each with its own wry twist, are discernible in Cold Comfort Farm, New Grub Street , and The Well of Loneliness .
This notion of life as a journey often supposes, as Bunyan did, that “the world” in which we find ourselves is only the first stage. The most elaborate description of the greater world, of which “the world” is but an element, was provided by Dante in The Divine Comedy , whose settings recur continually in modern literature, both literally and metaphorically. Cyclopedia of Literary Places covers John Milton's Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained as well as another Purgatory and a record of A Season in Hell . The conception of life's journey as a prelude inevitably transforms its representations, allowing the world to be reinterpreted as a Ship of Fools . The contrary assumption, that life's journey has no alternative but to find a terminus in this world, and that we had better be careful where we decide to go, is equally well represented herein, in such texts as Heart of Darkness, Green Mansions, As I Lay Dying , and Journey to the End of the Night .
Place in Literary Titles
The irresistible growth of literary naturalism has not weakened the metaphorical force of imagery derived from the Bible or from the analogy between life and a journey. No matter how mundane a description of setting might be, it takes on a peculiar gravity when a literary text devotes time and space to it; this is especially true when a seemingly modest description is deployed as a title. Such restrained appellations as The Bridge, Bus Stop, The Dining Room, Main Street, Middlemarch ,and The Village do not imply limitation but typicality. They refer to microcosms in which, despite their humility, all human life is contained. Paradoxical as it may seem, minute explorations of confinement generally aspire to a greater comprehensiveness than works whose titles refer to such broader and more disordered spans, such as Earth, Tropic of Cancer, U.S.A ., and The Waste Land .
It is significant, in view of these observations, that the most frequent term of location to be found in the contents pages of Cyclopedia of Literary Places is “House” (and also that the second most frequent is “Castle”) even though we have the assurance of Thomas Wolfe and Jack Kerouac that once life's journey is seriously commenced You Can't Go Home Again , because we are, or ought to be, forever On the Road . What all people need in order to find their way is an atlas, not of the world as it is or any particular fictitious world, but of that vast collective realm of the imagination, whose entirety contains and extrapolates our homes and our horizons alike.
The hypothetical atlas of the world that is the sum of all the worlds within literary texts differs from atlases of the actual world in several significant respects, of which the least important is its sheer size. As literary geographers have demonstrated—albeit within relatively narrow fields of concern—even an atlas of scrupulously naturalistic fictions exhibits some striking differences in detail. The careful study of literary works should enable us to construct a series of highly detailed maps showing the evolution of Paris or London during the last three centuries, but any comparison with actual street maps would immediately expose considerable gaps. Any town or village featured in a mere handful of literary works, no matter how evocative their descriptions might be, would be composed of a handful of disconnected landmarks and a huge bank of fog.
On the other hand, we would not need to expand our consideration very far beyond scrupulous naturalism to find an elaborate record of a whole series of parallel worlds, in which the villages, towns, cities, counties, and even nations of our world were replaced by mysterious clones like Thomas Hardy's Wessex, Arnold Bennett's Five Towns, or Anthony Trollope's Barchester, or supplemented with considerable tracts of land for which real maps have no available space, like Sinclair Lewis's Zenith, William Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha County, and Anthony Hope's Ruritania. Real and imaginary settings, and some that overlap the boundary, can be equally convincing stages for the dramas of human life, as demonstrated by Bartholomew Fair, Berlin Alexanderplatz, Bullet Park, The Charterhouse of Parma, Howards End, Hyde Park, Mansfield Park, Raintree County, Riceyman Steps, Tobacco Road, Tortilla Flat, Washington Square , and Winesburg, Ohio .
Hinterlands of the Imagination
As we move away from naturalistic fictions into the hinterlands of the imagination, the literary atlas becomes much more elaborate. Its reconfigurations of the actual world become cluttered with all manner of addenda— especially is-lands—and its parallel worlds, vastly multiplied, become much more elaborate and fanciful. Travel broadens the mind, and a lifetime's reading broadens it in ways that no other kind of experience can. We can only understand the places we know by comparing them to other places. “Home” means nothing until we have been out of it; “here” is unmeasurable unless we have a notion of “there”; “the world” is impossible to evaluate accurately until we can explore other worlds in which things work differently. We could not fully appreciate the limits of practicality had we not made imaginative forays into worlds where magic works; that is why the tales that were told and retold—and still are told and retold—before we had reading and writing to improve our resources, are mostly tales of an imaginary world in which the wishes reflected in daydreams really can have consequences. That world is revived, revised, and revisited time and time again in countless literary fairylands, and in such kindred constructs as Aristophanes’ Cloudcuckooland, the Never Land of Peter Pan , and the worlds that Alice finds in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and in Through the Looking-Glass .
It is because we can only really find ourselves by going away that literature is full of havens designed for exactly that purpose—and why the only part of Robinson Crusoe that anyone takes the trouble to remember is the castaway's sojourn on the island. Utopia, in the literal meaning of “no place” rather than the acquired meaning of an “ideal state,” is one of the most vital locations on any literary map, just as the most important journeys, from The Odyssey onward, have taken travelers into terra incognita where, as old maps used to put it, “Here be Dragons.” That description is, of course, intended to serve as a lure as well as a warning; dragons traditionally guard treasures, and the conventional literary reward for facing the hazards of extraordinary voyages is the gold of El Dorado, frequently mingled with gemstones, although even such innocent fantasies of enrichment as King Solomon's Mines and Treasure Island have significant metaphorical dimensions. Enlightenment is the ultimate treasure, even when its acquisition is costly and its taste less than sweet, as it is for such conventional travelersasStretherin The Ambassadors , Charles Ryder in Brideshead Revisited , and Johann Wolfgang van Goethe's Wilhelm Meister, as well as such explorers of exotica as the heroes of Out of the Silent Planet, The Sirens of Titan , and The Time Machine .
Imaginary places can be refined and purified in ways that real ones cannot, as Plato demonstrated in the Republic . Their refinement can sometimes instill a remarkable yearning for their realization, as Plato demonstrated when he suggested, playfully, that his ideal republic had once existed in Atlantis. Such processes of refinement, no matter what kind of perfection for which they aim, always tend to be tinged with irony and regret precisely because they do take us away from the practical. It is no coincidence that utopian fantasy is intricately entwined with satirical fantasy, even in its nostalgic Arcadian or Cockaynean mode.
The compendium of satirical locations featured in Gulliver's Travels prompted a sequence of echoes comparable to those of The Pilgrim's Progress. Cyclopedia of Literary Places offers cautionary accounts of such exemplary locations as Animal Farm, The City of the Sun, Erewhon , Herland, Penguin Island ,and Solaris ,as well as Thomas More's archetypal Utopia . However, ideals of a more self-indulgent kind are represented too, in images of Arcadia, The Earthly Paradise,the Middle-Earth of The Lord of the Rings , the Shangri-La of Lost Horizon , the Nepenthe of South Wind , and James Branch Cabell's Poictesme. Such realms fully deserve their pages in the atlas of the imagination—but they also deserve more careful comparison and more penetrating analysis than an atlas or a series of gazetteers can provide; this is one of the tasks Cyclopedia of Literary Places undertakes.
Literature and the Real World
There are two principal respects in which the worlds within texts differ from the world in which we actually live. One is that worlds within texts have inescapable moral orders. If principles of poetic justice are violated within them, it is because the authors violate them, calculatedly and brutally. Because readers are conscious of that fact, they are able to experience the bittersweet sensation of tragedy. The other difference is that worlds within texts are packed with meaning; if an element of the text has no aesthetic purpose, it ought not to be there. For this reason, the objects present in the environment of a well-wrought story to which the reader's attention is specifically directed are always more than “mere” decor.
Even an object that has a utilitarian purpose within a story usually carries a symbolic burden as well—timepieces are particularly prone to this kind of dual role— and those that are primarily ornamental, especially works of art and cut flowers, are dutiful servants of symbolism. The description of actual landscapes and quotidian weather in emotional terms may constitute a “pathetic fallacy.” However, in literary works, changes of scenery and the weather always tend to reflect the emotional states of the characters and the uneven flow of their stories.
In literary works, a mountain is never merely a mountain, a mere—or any other body of water—is never merely a mere, and mist or fog is invariably symptomatic of deeper confusions. Because these meanings tend to be embedded in the “background” of the story, however, they often go unapprehended by readers whose attention is firmly fixed on the events of the story, vicariously experienced by identification with one or more of the characters. This is not to say that these meanings do not ordinarily have an effect on the reader, but their situation in the background ensures that the effect is more likely to be subliminal than the effects of story and character.
There is, therefore, a sense in which [the first edition of] Cyclopedia of Literary Places [came] after its two companions because it [went] a little deeper, and a little further, in it its analysis of texts.... The analyses presented herein have their own revelations to offer, which are all the more interesting because they are fresh; they mark the beginning of a brand-new era in the strange science of literary geography.
—Brian Stableford King Alfred's College, 2003