Introduction: Space, Place, and Popular Fiction

Robert Louis Stevenson, in his 1882 essay, “A Gossip on Romance,” writes of the “fitness” of certain places for particular types of stories. Stevenson’s essay provides the launchpad for this book’s broad claim that genre and geography are mutually constitutive. The chapters collected in this volume show that popular fiction studies can be enriched by closer engagement with key terms from the lexicon of spatial and geographical studies, and, just as importantly, that scholars of popular fiction have much to offer geocriticism and the geohumanities more broadly.