X Marks the Spot : Women Writers Map the Empire for British Children, 1790-1895

A Childrens Literature Association Book Award Honor Book During the nineteenth century, geography primers shaped the worldviews of Britains 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. Introduction: mapping imperial hierarchies and ruling the world The dysfunctional "family of man": Mary Anne Venning and Barbara Hofland Classify human races in pre-darwinian primers Place settings at the imperial dinner party: hierarchies of consumption in the works of Favell Lee Mortimer, Sarah Lee, and Priscilla Wakefield Terra incognita: the gendering of geographic experience in the works of Barbara Hofland, Priscilla Wakefield, Mary H.C. Legh, Lucy Wilson, Mrs. E. Burrows, and Maria Hack "Prisoners in its spatial matrix"? resisting imperial geography in thirdspace Conclusion: contextualizing archival recovery.