List of fictional counties

Fictional counties are locations within books, movies, television shows or songs, created for character placement and story background. Fictional counties, cities and towns are arrows in the fiction writers' quivers – they lend an air of authenticity to the story, and since there are so many of them, readers find them to be a plausible addition that makes the story more realistic.[1] Credible, well fleshed out, and named locales are integral to fictional world building.[2]

William Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha County uses a convincing set of facts and details, and is a prototypical development of a place and time in a work of fiction.[3][4] Faulkner often referred to Yoknapatawpha County as "my apocryphal county."

Fictional county maps are part of the creative process (orienting both the writer and the reader to geography and relationships), and are part of selling the story.[5] They sometimes combine existing cartographic information to present an imaginary location, or combine existing cartographic information to show a different perspective of a location.[6] Absalom, Absalom! includes a map of Yoknapatawpha County drawn by Faulkner.[7]

United Kingdom

• Barsetshire – locale of Anthony Trollope's Chronicles of Barsetshire novel series; also used by various other authors
• Borsetshire – containing the village of Ambridge, in the BBC's long-running radio drama The Archers
• Midsomer – setting of the Chief Inspector Barnaby series by Caroline Graham and the TV adaptation Midsomer Murders. The book Great British Fictional Detectives writes, "Midsomer's villages and county town (Causton) are painted by Graham in faintly surreal colours and at times have a macabre tint."[8]
• Mummerset – county named for the non-specific West Country accent affected by actors
• Naptonshire – setting for Home Defence training simulations of the 1970s,[9] analogous to Northamptonshire
• Rutshire – setting of the Rutshire Chronicles by Jilly Cooper
• Trumptonshire – setting of the interrelated TV series Camberwick Green, Trumpton, and Chigley
• Wessex – location of Thomas Hardy's novels, comprising six fictitious counties: North Wessex (Berkshire), Upper Wessex (Hampshire), Mid Wessex (Wiltshire), South Wessex (Dorset), Outer Wessex (Somerset), and Lower Wessex (Devon), plus Off Wessex (Cornwall).

United States

• Georgia
  • McAfee County – Setting of the novels McAfee County: A Chronicle (1971) and Angel Child (1987) by Mark Steadman. The Companion to Southern Literature wrote, "He created an entire fictional community in Georgia where a series of strikingly singular characters, mostly lower-class racists, radicals, criminals, and dim-witted innocents, unself-consciously act out the sexual, racial, and economic tensions that define their lives."[10]
• Indiana
  • Raintree County – setting of the 1948 novel Raintree County by Ross Lockridge, Jr. The county includes representations of two actual counties, Allen and Monroe.[11]
• Kentucky
  • Burdock County – Setting of the 1983 novel The Natural Man by Ed McClanahan. The protagonist lives in the fictional town of Needmore within the county. The Kentucky Anthology: Two Hundred Years of Writing in the Bluegrass State writes that the town and county was likely inspired by McClanahan's own upbringing in Brooksville in Bracken County.[12]
  • Crow County – Setting of the novels Clay's Quilt, A Parchment of Leaves, and The Coal Tattoo by Silas House. He grew up in Leslie County, which served as the basis for the county in the novels.[13]
• Mississippi
  • Boone County – Setting of the 1970 novel Losing Battles by Eudora Welty. It is located in northeast Mississippi. It is likely modeled on Tishomingo County or at least in the same geographic area. Eudora Welty's Aesthetics of Place writes, "The location is important because it explains the traditional poverty, the absence of plantations, and the absence of black people in Losing Battles. The area is an extension of the hills of Middle Tennessee, and the soil in these hills is made up of gravel and sand."[14]
  • Yoknapatawpha County – in the works of William Faulkner[3][4]
  • Tibbehah County – Setting of Quinn Colson novel series by Ace Atkins. The author calls the county "the quintessential North Mississippi town – on the surface". He compared it to actual counties Marshall, Calhoun, and Yalobusha.[15]
• Montana
  • Hope County – Setting of video game Far Cry 5. The Billings Gazette wrote, "The fictional Hope County looks and feels most like the northwestern part of the state, with tall peaks, winding rivers and lots of evergreen forests. But it could just as easily stand in for the Absaroka-Beartooth Wilderness in south-central Montana."[16]
• Texas
  • Belken County – Rio Grande Valley setting of Rolando Hinojosa-Smith's novels of the Klail City Death Trip Series (KCDTS), e.g., The Valley complete with history and maps[17]

See also

• Lists of fictional locations
• List of fictional U.S. states

References

1. Wolf, Mark J.P. (March 14, 2014). Building Imaginary Worlds: The Theory and History of Subcreation. London: Routledge. p. 45. ISBN 9781136220807. Fictional counties,cities, and towns, however, are easier to accept, because there are so many real ones, that quite likely no audience member will know them all (though the invention may seem contrived if one happens to live right there...
2. Hillebrant, Tim (August 23, 2019). "Worldbuilding: How to Create a Believable World for Your Fiction Characters". Writelife. Retrieved March 31, 2020.
3. Doyle, Don Harrison (June 30, 2001). Faulkner's County: The Historical Roots of Yoknapatawpha (New ed.). The University of North Carolina Press. p. 24. ISBN 0807826154.
4. Beebee, Thomas O. (January 1, 2008). Nation and Region in Modern American and European Fiction. Writelife. Purdue University Press. p. 99. Retrieved March 31, 2020.
5. Kinberger, Michaela (Feb 26, 2009). "Cartography and Art". Book. Springer Berlin Heidelberg: 1–11. doi:10.1007/978-3-540-68569-2_22. ISBN 978-3-540-68569-2.
6. Strange Maps (Mar 30, 2009). "370 – Palestine's Island Paradise, Now With a Word from its Creator". Blog. StrangeMaps. Retrieved 2013-05-16.
7. Hamblin, Robert. "Faulkner's Map of Yoknapatawpha: The End of Absalom, Absalom!". Center for Faulkner Studies.
8. James, Russell (2009). Great British Fictional Detectives. Remember When. pp. 49–50. ISBN 978-1-84468-026-9.
9. Hartley, David A.; Johnson, Philip V.; Fitzsimons, Anne; Lovell, Jenny; Chippendale, Brian; Clayton, John K. S. (1 January 1979). "A Case Study on the Development of the Home Defence Training Game HOT SEAT". The Journal of the Operational Research Society. 30 (10): 861–871. doi:10.2307/3009541. JSTOR 3009541.
10. The Companion to Southern Literature: Themes, Genres, Places, People, Movements, and Motifs. Southern Literary Studies. LSU Press. 2001. p. 357. ISBN 978-0-8071-2692-9.
11. Castaldi, Tom (September 2, 2016). "The Indelible Ross Lockridges". blog.history.in.gov. Government of Indiana. Retrieved April 1, 2020.
12. Hall, Wade, ed. (2005). The Kentucky Anthology: Two Hundred Years of Writing in the Bluegrass State. University Press of Kentucky. pp. 369–371. ISBN 978-0-8131-2376-9.
13. Writing Appalachia: An Anthology. University Press of Kentucky. 2020. p. 592. ISBN 978-0-8131-7881-3.
14. Gretlund, Jan Nordby (1997). "In Boone County — Talking". Eudora Welty's Aesthetics of Place. University of South Carolina Press. p. 247. ISBN 978-1-57003-195-3.
15. Guizerix, Anna (July 15, 2018). "True Southern Crime: Ace Atkins and Tibbehah County". The Oxford Eagle. Retrieved April 1, 2020.
16. Doak, Chase (April 7, 2018). "5 things 'Far Cry 5' gets right about Montana, and 5 things it gets wrong". The Billings Gazette. Retrieved April 1, 2020.
17. Fagan, Allison E. (July 14, 2016). From the Edge: Chicana/o Border Literature and the Politics of Print. New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press. pp. 29–31. ISBN 9780813583853.