Immersion in Print: Design, Sensory Reading, and Spatial Imaginaries in Nineteenth-Century Chorography

The persuasive agency of immersive chorographic (place) maps resided in their coordination of word, image, and material affordance. Arraying text labels for 360-degree viewing and reading helped naturalize contested visions of sovereignty, territory, and belonging through subjective orientation. Immersion in Print traces the development of this immersive rhetoric, and the manners of looking and reading it cultivated, in Europe and the United States. The book intervenes in debates on intermediality, reproduction, and the material life of images by repositioning printed place maps and related ephemera as media environments that actively organized embodied experience and spatial ideology in the long nineteenth century.