Two Views of Literary Setting: Deep Locating Twentieth-Century America and Its Rural/Urban Transitions

TRANSITION Talk with Jason Finch, Åbo Akademi University.

Literary texts tell stories – and they also create places. In this talk, Jason Finch explores how streets, neighborhoods, and regions come into view through narrative, shaped by perspective, memory, and imagination. Rather than treating setting as mere background, he investigates how literary representations of place can offer insight into lived experience in specific times and contexts.

Focusing on twentieth-century American literature, Jason brings together texts by writers such as James Weldon Johnson, Langston Hughes, Tennessee Williams, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Jonathan Franzen. Moving between locations including Harlem in New York and the wider urban region of St. Louis plus territories formerly traversed by the lines of the Missouri Pacific Railroad (operational from 1872 to 1997), he traces how relationships between rural and urban spaces are imagined and reworked across time. Attention to mobility, infrastructure, and everyday life highlights how these settings are shaped by broader social and spatial transformations.

At the same time, Jason also reflects on what it means to use literary texts as a source of historical insight. Rather than treating them as straightforward evidence, he considers how narrative form, perspective, and invention shape what can be known about the past. Bringing these dimensions together opens a way of reading, which connects storytelling with questions of place, inequality, and belonging.

Bio

Jason Finch is Professor of English Language and Literature at Åbo Akademi University. His research focuses on literary urban studies, with particular interest in how cities, infrastructures, and mobility are represented in literature. He is the author of Deep Locational Criticism (2016) and Literary Urban Studies and How to Practice It (2022) and has published widely on literary approaches to urban history, housing, and transport. His work brings literary analysis into dialogue with urban and mobility studies, exploring how texts both reflect and shape the experience of place.

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Literary setting can be viewed as a function of narrative or as a kind of historical evidence. As the former, it provides background, context and what Roland Barthes called the ‘reality effect’. But since authors both manipulate perspectives on place to tell stories and invent places outright, representations of settings contained in literary texts can seem a suspect evidential category. Three propositions are operative here.

  1. Literary modes such as prose fiction, poetry and drama imperfectly enable access to qualitative dimensions of historical human experience as it is lived in place, including of actual inequalities and social structures.
  2. Settings that are recognizably real on the terms of historians are an element of narrative that narratologists have not yet adequately included in their models.
  3. While literary analysis generates historical evidence drawn from depictions found in texts and from an understanding of texts’ conditions of production (Proposition 1 above), overlooking such texts’ identity as examples of storytelling – one that poems, plays, short stories and novels share with non-fictional genres of text such as memoir and travel writing – distorts understanding of the historical field which, among their other activities, they narrate.

This talk refines Deep Locational Criticism as a method through encounters with narrative ethics, comparative urban humanities and mobility humanities, exploring as case studies twentieth-century American literary mediations of rural/urban relations (and transitions) dating from the period between the First World War and the 9/11 attacks. Writers discussed include James Weldon Johnson, Langston Hughes, Tennessee Williams, Gwendolyn Brooks and Jonathan Franzen. Real-world sites in focus are Harlem in New York, the city of St Louis, Missouri, and its urban region on either side of the Mississippi, plus the territories formerly traversed by the lines of the Missouri Pacific Railroad, operational from 1872 to 1997.