Mapping with Words re-conceptualizes settler writing as literary cartography. The topographical descriptions of early Canadian settler writers generated not only picturesque and sublime landscapes, but also verbal maps. These worked to orient readers, reinforcing and expanding the cartographic order of the emerging colonial dominion.

Drawing upon the work of critical and cultural geographers as well as literary theorists, Sarah Wylie Krotz opens up important aesthetic and political dimensions of both familiar and obscure texts from the nineteenth century, including Thomas Cary’s Abram’s Plains, George Monro Grant’s Ocean to Ocean, and Susanna Moodie’s Roughing it in the Bush. Highlighting the complex territoriality that emerges from their cartographic aesthetics, Krotz offers fresh readings of these texts, illuminating their role in an emerging spatial imaginary that was at once deeply invested in the production of colonial spaces and at the same time enmeshed in the realities of confronting Indigenous sovereignties.

Sarah Wylie Krotz is an assistant professor in the Department of English and Film Studies at the University of Alberta.

Sarah Wylie Krotz's profile page

"Mapping with Words is so engaging that the blurbs by Jenny Kerber and Christoph Irmscher rightly call it a ‘pleasure’ and ‘fun to read.’"

<em>University of Toronto Quarterly: Letters in Canada 2018</em>

“What can geographers learn from Mapping with Words? Through carefully selected texts, analyzed through a literary cartographic approach, Krotz helps us understand geographical change in particular places in Canada, as the land was being colonized. She shows what happens on the ground, in lived experience and observation, as new people and new forces arrive and disrupt existing Indigenous society. She draws out a deeper geographical life in particular regions, which leads to a fuller understanding of their geography of today.”

<em>The Canadian Geographer</em>

"The most appealing aspect of Mapping with Words is that Krotz acknowledges the messiness, terror and labour involved in producing early maps – the result of the efforts not only of the explorers who drew them, but of many others, including voyageurs, Indigenous advisors and guides, women, and even children."

<em>Literary Geographies</em>