Narratives of California’s Heartland: A Geographic Perspective on the Fictional Literature of the Central Valley

Stacie Townswend
Geography
UC Davis

California is often referred to as an island separate from other states, and both a state of mind and state of the union. As a place, it attracts nearly endless attention. Its popularity, frequency, and impact in creative literature, for example, has helped to develop California into the cultural and emotive force that it is today. However, treatment of California’s many varied landscapes in fiction has not been evenly investigated. Particularly, the literary landscape of California’s Central Valley has been under-examined with respect to contributions to geographic knowledge of the state. This project deconstructs the creation and perpetuation of California’s Central Valley as a physical landscape and emotional geographic construct using a literary content analysis of California fiction. The novels pull from California‚ 20th-century history, allowing for an examination of aspects of change in the literature‚ themes, expressed perceptions, and representational language of the Central Valley.