X Marks the Spot — 2010 ·

Women Writers Map the Empire for British Children, 1790–1895

By Megan A. Norcia

“This is a sophisticated analysis based on original research.”

Mary Jean Corbett — author of Family Likeness: Sex, Marriage, and Incest from Jane Austen to Virginia Woolf

During the nineteenth century, geography primers shaped the worldviews of Britain’s ruling classes and laid the foundation for an increasingly globalized world. Written by middle-class women who mapped the world that they had neither funds nor freedom to traverse, the primers employed rhetorical tropes such as the Family of Man or discussions of food and customs in order to plot other cultures along an imperial hierarchy.

Cross-disciplinary in nature, X Marks the Spot is an analysis of previously unknown material that examines the interplay between gender, imperial duty, and pedagogy.

Megan A. Norcia offers an alternative map for traversing the landscape of nineteenth-century female history by reintroducing the primers into the dominant historical record. This is the first full-length study of the genre as a distinct tradition of writing produced on the fringes of professional geographic discourse before the high imperial period.

Megan A. Norcia is an assistant professor of English at SUNY Brockport.