This book investigates a cluster of concepts that gather around the question of topography. They include the initiating efficacy of speech acts, ethical responsibility, political or legislative power, the translation of theory from one topographical location to another, the way topographical delineations can function as parable or allegory, the relation of personification to landscape. The question of the way speech acts operate in literature and in life is the most pervasive of these topics. Just what, in a given text is the topographical component and how does it operate? Though the texts examined are primarily by nineteenth- and twentieth-century poets (Tennyson, Hopkins, Stevens), novelists (Kleist, Dickens, Hardy, Faulkner), philosopher-theorists (Nietzsche, Heidegger, Derrida), Plato's Protagoras and the Book of Ruth are also included.