Inhabiting Land in the Age of Empire: Twentieth-Century Literature

Abstract

For his sixth novel The Return of the Native, Thomas Hardy drew his own “Sketch Map” (figure 1) of Egdon Heath—the open land on which and in which the story takes place. The map sits laconically alongside the famous opening description of the heath. The heath itself is an eccentric space of land so crucial to the novel’s plot and to the development of its characters that it would be an extreme injustice to refer to it as “backdrop” to the story. For a comparable reason, it would be an injustice to discard the map as a mere “representation” of the more important description of the heath located within the novel proper. It is worth pausing, consequently, to consider the map itself before turning to the novel.

Everything about human history is rooted in the earth, which has meant that we must think about habitation.

—Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism