Though it suggests something of its bold interdisciplinarity, the title of William A. Gleason's compelling monograph barely captures the ease and fluidity of his skilful navigation through these broad territories. Sites Unseen: Architecture, Race, and American Literature essentially begins the much-needed work of reconceptualizing both well-known American literary texts and lesser-known writing of the “pattern book” era, roughly the 1850s to 1930s, through both a spatial and a racial analytical frame.

In weaving together the fields of architectural history and literature, Gleason succeeds, as he intends to, in laying down some very fertile scholarly soil. Sites Unseen addresses both the narrative elements of architecture and, conversely, the use of architectural elements in narrative, yet also provocatively incorporates within this dynamic the added dimension of race. Its central questions revolve about the way architecture (real and imagined) both shapes and challenges the sociopolitical structures of racialized societies. In so doing, Gleason shines a new light not only on the racial significance of the built environment, but more excitingly on the particular possibilities that the study of stories and imagined places lends to this emerging area.

After providing his own “floor plan” to describe the shape and contours of his study, Gleason begins with a brief exploration of architecture as a field that came of age professionally in this era. Yet he soon takes us far beyond the influential architectural texts of the time to intriguingly similar depictions in very different places. Taking a wide view of both “literature” and “architecture,” Gleason effortlessly glides through illustrated catalogs, advertisement copy, scrapbooks, furnishings, and even board games of the era, showing us that popular material culture of all kinds can be “provocative artifacts in the study of race, architecture, and writing” (25). It is perhaps this sheer breadth of source material that allows Gleason to focus so productively on the conceptual relationships of race and place that characterize this study, and to visualize them for us so vividly.

Addressing Levander and Levine's call for a “hemispheric American studies” (29), literature from across the Americas is tackled. The chapters take us from the slaveholding American south, to the transnational Gulf, and on to the sunshiny landscapes of Hawaii. For Gleason, the stories under consideration are not simply set in, but are fundamentally shaped by, the locations, sites, and even interiors they depict. Craft's The Bondwoman's Narrative offers an insight into the resonance and desire of cottage architecture for both the free and the enslaved, while Chesnutt's conjure tales are dwelt upon for their continual and indeed purposeful return to the space of the plantation piazza. In Gleason's reading of Chesnutt's intentions, this “chief architectural marker of southern white racial superiority” (29) emerges as a far more creolized and instrumental space.

Though Gleason does not explicitly acknowledge it, “the architectural forms of both bondage and freedom” (34) in their widest sense remain significant in the chapters that follow. The complex racial commentaries underlying various evocations of closed and suffocating spaces, used for example in popular chinatown novels, are pitched against the narrative functions of quite the opposite kinds of space; the open, flowing spaces of both Biggers's Charlie Chan novels and the architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright. Similarly, in the final chapter's exploration of literary depictions of the highly racialized spaces of the White House, the theme of vulnerability even in spaces of freedom returns yet again.

In his highly engaging, often witty, analyses, Gleason convinces us not only of the centrality of architecture to stories, but also of the significance of race. Indeed, Sites Unseen fulfils its brief – to underscore “the need to make race itself a more salient factor in our studies” (31) – and yet does this without sidestepping the equally crucial factors of gender and class, which unsurprisingly resurface repeatedly throughout its pages.

True to its title, this volume throws light on many “sites unseen,” yet Gleason's offering also remains a powerful commentary on the inherent desires to claim one's own space. This claim is expressed not simply by those seemingly disempowered and excluded – the desire of slaves for homeownership, for example – but also, in a fascinating juxtaposition of the writing of Richard Harding Davis and the relatively unknown Olga Torres, by those with desires for rather more imperialistic intervention. Bringing these jarring agendas side by side, Gleason opens up fresh ways of analysing spaces, sites and structures along racial lines, and shows us ultimately how the pushing of the boundaries of literature, narrative and story can permeate and enrich the study of much more.