Reading the reception of Ellen Churchill Semple’s Influences of geographic environment (1911)
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Date
2008Author
Keighren, Innes M
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Abstract
This is a thesis in the historical geography of textual reception and meaning. Its focus is
Influences of geographic environment (1911), by American geographer Ellen Churchill Semple
(1861–1932). Semple’s book, a treatise on environmentalism, coincided with the
emergence of geography in North America and Britain as an independent academic
discipline, and it exerted an important but varied influence on generations of
geographers. For those who considered it a monument to Semple’s scholarship and
erudition, it was a timely manifesto for a scientific approach to geographical research.
For others, Influences was conceptually flawed—a text which might damage geography’s
emergent academic legitimacy and disciplinary credibility. Accepted by some, repudiated
by others, Influences was lauded and criticized in almost equal measure.
By attention to archival records, personal correspondence, published reviews,
provenance, and marginalia—the material traces of its reading—the thesis examines the
different reactions to Influences, and shows that it is possible to trace a geography of the
book’s reception: to identify why it was encountered differently by different people, at
different times and in different places. Informed by work in literary theory, book history,
and the history of science, this thesis outlines the contribution that geography, or a
geographical sensibility, can make to understanding the way knowledge and ideas in the
guise of the printed text are conceived, transmitted, and received. By exploring the
particular characteristics of Influences’ diffusion, the thesis offers a broader perspective
on the different means by which scientific knowledge circulates; how its credibility is
assessed; and how judgements as to its acceptance or rejection are made. In reading thus
the different receptions of Semple’s text, the thesis proposes ways in which geographers
might usefully engage with the cultural study of print in historical and geographical
context.