Mark Storey's ambitious project, Rural Fictions, Urban Realities: A Geography of Gilded Age American Literature, studies rural fictions for “markers of modernity,” arguing that “a new understanding of the relationship between literature and modernity can be gained through a kind of geographical estrangement” (2). That is, rural fictions' ostensible distance from urban industrial capitalism enables a clearer view of “modernity's impact on socio-cultural life and literature” (2). Such an approach offers several potential advantages. It deconstructs the traditional city–country binary and demonstrates how each domain leaks into the other. Separating rural fiction from the pastoral mode, it distinguishes productively between the regional and the rural (especially relevant given regionalist criticism's emphasis on nationalism and globalization), suggesting a “transregional” rural perspective. And it foregrounds the generic instability that parallels – and helps readers interrogate – how we construct traditional literary periods.

The book assesses four “key discourses or themes of modernization – namely transport, entertainment, medicine, and law,” focussing synecdochally on train journeys, traveling circuses, country doctors, and lynch mobs (20). Storey acknowledges the limitations of this structure, but for this reader the methodology provides significant interpretive leverage, with the benefit of being interestingly specific. Following the introduction, the first four chapters of Rural Fictions tackle these discourses in turn; a fifth chapter examines utopian fictions, which, Storey shows, encode modernity's simultaneously vexed and desired arrival. Overlaid on this cultural mapping, another key interpretive strategy is the author's embrace of textual glimpses, thus deprivileging whole fictions and collating cognate narrative moments that acquire cumulative force. One of the book's noteworthy contributions is its scope, its reach toward many unknown as well as canonical texts, which enhances the discussion's persuasiveness and liveliness.

Many readers will find Storey's genre analysis among the book's most valuable features. Though chapter 1 deemphasizes this subject somewhat, those that follow detail with increasing strength the association between their main topic and literary forms. Chapter 3, on country doctors, offers particularly robust arguments for this linkage; discussing Elizabeth Stuart Phelps's neglected novel Dr. Zay, Storey contends that the “oscillation between sentimental, romantic, and realist idioms is linked to the unsettled medical context that frames the narrative, that in itself is imbued with a geographical element that feeds back into those same generic shifts” (108). Such insights not only elucidate a particular novel, they also help reanimate many significant overlooked texts.

Rural Fictions also attends engrossingly to historical and cultural details. In chapter 1, the author usefully evaluates “the altered contours of subjective perception” – that is, the train traveler's temporal and visual apprehension of rural space (33); he introduces this focus by indicating how standardized time transformed journeyers' comprehension of themselves, their location, and their national identities. Chapter 2 provides fascinating contextual material about nineteenth-century traveling circuses, even analyzing how circus posters interact with literary texts like Jewett's Deephaven. In chapter 3 we learn about the emergence of scientific, city-based medical practice and how professionalized medicine traveled unevenly to rural areas, while chapter 4 contextualizes the horrific history of lynching within contemporary US legal debates. To encompass each of his key subjects, the author has conducted wide-ranging research that supports his analysis well. However, the book is sometimes overcrowded by other critical voices, unnecessarily obscuring the author's own. My respect for Storey's intellectual project makes me reluctant to mention one frustrating stylistic feature: the narrative relies excessively on passive verbs, which can render agency – especially authors' agency – obscure.

Every reviewer has her individual desiderata. I wish that Storey had detailed more expansively how social class impacts the intersections of “rural fictions” and “urban realities.” Moreover, despite its announced focus, Rural Fictions seems to privilege the urban (and its affiliated modernity) over the rural; the author appears not to doubt the former's precedence, and the rural becomes merely a mirror for reflecting modernity. Today, when various cultural critics question or condemn many features of modern urban industrial capitalism based on an unsustainable economic and environmental model – and many individuals are again taking seriously Thoreau's imperative to “simplify, simplify” – such an omission may seem troubling. But illuminating the continuing importance of rurality, especially in a planetary perspective, is perhaps another project. Self-aware, critically engaged, and often compelling – and providing a welcome corrective to the shortcomings of regionalist studies – Rural Fictions exposes our limited views on genre, period, and geography, and it should propel us to reconsider and reinvent them.