This chapter seeks to better understand the formation of literary-geographical identities and imaginaries by examining the publications and cultural afterlife of Captain John Smith, the explorer, promoter, author, soldier, and self-made knight so closely associated with the beginning of English involvement in North America, and particularly with the original colony of Virginia. The chapter provides a brief overview of the longstanding tendency to see Smith and his works as belonging to, and even a point of origin for, the literature and character of America and the U.S. South, and how this has made him a political and historical lightning rod in highly contentious constructions of North/South identity. To account for this contentious afterlife, but to also move beyond it, the chapter surveys critical approaches that have since better situated Smith’s place in the literature and culture of Renaissance England. Looking at examples from his major works, the chapter attempts to show some of Smith’s experimental structuring and shaping of oppositional and antithetical literary-geographical imaginaries, which he employed to address economic and geographical challenges for the English nation state in the modern colonial and plantation context.

Considerations of geography and Scottish Romanticism have tended to focus on the function of landscape and setting as vehicles for exploring national and regional identity. This tendency is apparent in many scholarly assessments of post-Enlightenment Scottish literature and culture, but it is especially evident in recent evaluations of the works of Sir Walter Scott. Collectively, these evaluations have enhanced our understanding of Scott’s influence on modern conceptions of Scottish selfhood. Far less attention, however, has been paid to Scott’s personal understanding of geography, and almost no one has considered the relevance of Scott’s writings to latter-day developments in geographical thought and practice. The present chapter takes up these neglected topics, and in doing so it undertakes to examine the relation of Scott’s early poetry and antiquarian research to the emergence of ‘deep mapping’ as a field of performance and inquiry.

Chapter One contextualises the dynamic model of reading and mapping in terms of an evolving interdisciplinary relationship between literature, geography and cartography. It outlines the ways in which forms of literary mapping have emerged out of that connection before turning to critical cartography and its potential in relation to a more critical form of literary mapping. The final sections of the chapter use Gérard Genette’s concept of the paratext to analyse the material nature of the juxtaposition of map and text. (82)

‘Transposing the Restoration’ explores connections between, and assesses the cumulative impact of, the three main chapters of The Restoration Transposed. It considers the book’s implications for issues and topics such as translation, the transition from a manuscript- to a print-based literary culture, the spread of English-language literary publishing outside London, the participation and presentation of women in the literary sphere, and the development of the English literary canon. It also describes and seeks to account for the differing characters of each of the literary decades from the 1660s to the 1690s. It concludes by considering how the fresh perspectives offered by The Restoration Transposed may alter perceptions of poets as various as Milton, Marvell, Dryden, Cowley and Rochester and makes the case for the transposed Restoration as offering a view of its poetry that is less narrow and elitist and more sympathetic and open to diversity than conventional accounts of the period.