Abstract
This chapter examines the resistance in literary criticism to making maps. Literary analysis is deeply invested in the construction of space and associated theories, but these have rarely been cartographical. Recent work that discusses the development of maps and literature in the early modern period is surveyed briefly, before focusing on the early 20th century as a key moment. The relationship between the map and the physical world is discussed in the context of realist fiction, highlighting the impossibility of realist fiction being real just as the map is not the territory. Maps, however, are used in literature to enhance the reality of the fictional world, from science fiction to novels prophesying war . (Post)colonial literatures are seen as a vital site of literary mapping, using Conrad’s Heart of Darkness as a case study. The chapter concludes by examining theoretical standpoints, engaging with the plausibility of Fredric Jameson’s concept of cognitive mapping and his spatialising of literature through the semiotic rectangle. Franco Moretti’s work on mapping is invoked as one potential way forward for literary cartography, albeit one which needs further critical refinement. Literary critics are encouraged to shed their inhibitions about using and making maps, examining the work of Barbara Piatti’s cohort on The Literary Atlas of Europe as another avenue for exploration. Interdisciplinary collaboration will be invaluable in the development of literary cartrographies.
Keywords
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.
Buying options
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Learn about institutional subscriptionsFurther Reading
The Cartographic Journal, 48(4) (2011). Special edition edited by Barbara Piatti and Lorenz Hurni. Consists primarily of contributions from Piatti and her cohort, whose work is difficult to find in English; her book Die Geographie der Literatur (2009) offers the most convincing and extensively theorised take on literary cartography.
Huggan, G. (1994). Territorial Disputes: Maps and mapping strategies in contemporary Canadian and Australian fiction. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. One of the early works in postcolonial studies to explicitly address the trope of mapping, and Huggan posits his “First Principles for a Literary Cartography” in his introduction.
Jameson, F. (1991). Postmodernism: Or, the cultural logic of late capitalism. London: Verso. Jameson’s theory of postmodernism builds on the work done by Harvey (1989) and Soja (1989) and insists on the importance of space and materialism in interpretation. The final parts of the long conclusion deal with cognitive mapping.
Moretti, F. (2005). Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract models for a literary history. London: Verso. The most extensive attempt so far to use visual representations of place and data in literary criticism. Its idiosyncracies have provoked some criticism, and it is certainly a text which stimulates debate.
New Formations, 57 (2005). Special edition edited by Richard Phillips and Scott McCracken. Contains a range of criticism at the intersection of literature and geography written by academics from both disciplines, and includes Thacker’s valuable “The Idea of a Critical Literary Geography”.
References
Barnett, C. (1998). The cultural turn: Fashion or progress in human geography? Antipode, 30, 379–394.
Benjamin, W. (1999). The arcades project. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Berland, J. (2005). After the fact: Spatial narratives in the Canadian imaginary. New Formations, 57, 39–55.
Borges, J. L. (1975). On exactitude in science. In A universal history of infamy (p. 131). Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Bourdieu, P. (1993). The field of cultural production. Cambridge: Polity.
Bourdieu, P. (1984 [1979]). Distinction: A social critique of the judgement of taste. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
Bracken, L., & Oughton, E. (2006). ‘What do you mean?’ The importance of language in developing interdisciplinary research. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 31, 371–382.
Bradbury, M. (Ed.). (1996). The atlas of literature. New York: de Agostini.
Brosseau, M. (1994). Geography’s literature. Progress in Human Geography, 18, 333–353.
Bulson, E. (2006). Novels, maps, modernity: The spatial imagination, 1850–2000. London: Routledge.
Bushell, S. (2012). The slipperiness of literary maps: Critical cartography and literary cartography. Cartographica, 47(3), 149–160.
Childers, E. (2007 [1903]). The riddle of the sands: A record of secret service. London: Penguin.
Conley, T. (1997). The self-made map: Cartographic writing in early modern France. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Conrad, J. (2007 [1899]). Heart of darkness. London: Penguin.
Conrad, J. (1924). Geography and some explorers. National Geographic Magazine, 45, 241–274.
Coroneos, C. (2002). Space, Conrad, and modernity. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Dear, M., Ketchum, J., Luria, S., & Richardson, D. (Eds.). (2011). GeoHumanities: Art, history and text at the edge of place. London: Routledge.
Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1988). A thousand plateaus: Capitalism and schizophrenia. London: Athlone.
DiBattista, M., & McDiarmid, L. (Eds.). (1996). High and low moderns: Literature and culture 1889–1939. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Draper, J., & Fowles, J. (1984). Thomas Hardy’s England. London: Jonathan Cape.
Friedman, S. S. (1998). Mappings: Feminism and the cultural geographies of encounter. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Friel, B. (1981). Translations. London: Faber and Faber.
Fuson, B. (1970). At halfway point: State literary maps. The English Journal, 59(1), 87–98.
Gikandi, S. (1996). Maps of Englishness: Writing identity in the culture of colonialism. New York: Columbia University Press.
Gilbert, P. (2009). Sex and the modern city: English studies and the spatial turn. In B. Warf & S. Arias (Eds.), The spatial turn: Interdisciplinary perspectives (pp. 102–121). Abingdon: Routledge.
GoGwilt, C. (1995). The invention of the west: Joseph Conrad and the double-mapping of Europe and empire. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Goodwin, J., & Holbo, J. (Eds.). (2011). Reading graphs, maps, trees: Critical responses to Franco Moretti. Anderson, SC: Parlor Press.
Greimas, A. J., & Rastier, F. (1968). The interaction of semiotic constraints. Yale French Studies, 41, 86–105.
Habermann, I., & Kulm, N. (2011). Sustainable fictions—Geographical, literary and cultural intersections in J.R.R. Tolkein’s Lord of the Rings. The Cartographic Journal, 48(4), 263–273.
Hand, E. (2011). Culturomics: Word play. Nature, 474, 436–440.
Harley, J. B. (2009 [1989]). Deconstructing the map. In M. Dodge (Ed.), Classics in cartography: Reflections on influential articles from Cartographica (pp. 273–294). Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell.
Harpold, T. (2005). Verne’s cartographies. Science Fiction Studies, 32(1), 18–42.
Harvey, D. (1989). The condition of postmodernity: An enquiry into the origins of cultural change. Oxford: Blackwell.
Harvey, D. (2001). The cartographic imagination: Balzac in Paris. In V. Dharwadker (Ed.), Cosmopolitan geographies: New locations in literature and culture (pp. 63–87). New York and London: Routledge.
Hawkins, D. (1983). Hardy’s Wessex. London: Macmillan.
Hegglund, J. (2012). World views: Metageographies of modernist fiction. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Hewitt, R. (2010). Map of a nation: A biography of the ordnance survey. London: Granta.
Hones, S. (2008). Text as it happens: Literary geography. Geography Compass, 2(5), 1301–1317.
Hones, S. (2014). Literary geographies: Narrative space in let the great world spin. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Huggan, G. (1994). Territorial disputes: Maps and mapping strategies in contemporary Canadian and Australian fiction. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
Huyssen, A. (1988). After the great divide: Modernism, mass culture, postmodernism. Basingstoke: Macmillan.
Jameson, F. (1988). Nationalism, colonialism and literature: Modernism and imperialism. Derry: Field Day.
Jameson, F. (1991). Postmodernism: Or, the cultural logic of late capitalism. London: Verso.
Jameson, F. (2003). The end of temporality. Critical Inquiry, 29(4), 695–718.
Jameson, F. (2005). Archaeologies of the future: The desire called utopia and other science fictions. London: Verso.
Kane, M. (1999). Modern men: Mapping masculinity in English and German literature, 1880–1930. London: Cassell.
King, G. (1996). Mapping reality: An exploration of cultural cartographies. Basingstoke: Macmillan.
Klein, B. (2001). Maps and the writing of space in early modern England. Basingstoke: Palgrave.
Latour, B., & Woolgar, S. (1986). Laboratory life: The construction of scientific facts (2nd ed.). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Lefebvre, H. (1991 [1974]). The production of space. (Trans.) Donald Nicholson-Smith. Oxford: Blackwell.
Lilley, K. (Ed.). (2014). Mapping medieval geographies: Geographical encounters in the latin west and beyond, 300–1600. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Lindop, G. (1993). A literary guide to the Lake District. London: Chatto & Windus.
Lynch, K. (1960). The image of the city. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Mao, D., & Walkowitz, R. (2006). Bad modernisms. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Matei-Chesnoiu, M. (2012). Re-imagining western European geography in English renaissance drama. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Matei-Chesnoiu, M. (2015). Geoparsing early modern English drama. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
McCracken, S. (2007). Masculinities, modernist fiction and the urban public sphere. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Monmonier, M. (1993). Mapping it out: Expository cartography for the humanities and social sciences. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Monmonier, M. (2004). Rhumb lines and map wars: A social history of the Mercator projection. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Moretti, F. (1998). Atlas of the European novel 1800–1900. London: Verso.
Moretti, F. (2005). Graphs, maps, trees: Abstract models for a literary history. London: Verso.
Moretti, F. (2013). Distant reading. London: Verso.
Muecke, S. (1992). Textual spaces: Aboriginality and cultural studies. Kensington: New South Wales University Press.
Muehrcke, P., & Muehrcke, J. (1974). Maps in literature. Geographical Review, 64(3), 317–337.
Ousby, I. (1990). Blue guide to literary Britain and Ireland. London: Black.
Padrón, R. (2007). Mapping imaginary worlds. In J. Akerman & R. Karrow Jr. (Eds.), Maps: Finding our place in the world (pp. 255–287). Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Perkins, C. (2003). Cartography: Mapping theory. Progress in Human Geography, 27(3), 341–351.
Peters, J. (2004). Mapping discord: Allegorical cartography in early modern French writing. Newark: University of Delaware Press.
Phillips, R. (1997). Mapping men and empire: A geography of adventure. London: Routledge.
Phillips, R., & McCracken, S. (2005). Editorial. New Formations, 57, 7–9.
Philo, C. (1991). New words, new worlds: Reconceptualising social and cultural geography. Lampeter: St. David’s University College.
Piatti, B., Bär, H. R., Reuschel, A.-K., Hurni, L., & Cartwright, W. (2009). Mapping literature: Towards a geography of fiction. In W. Cartwright, G. Gartner, & A. Lehn (Eds.), Cartography and art (pp. 177–192). Berlin: Springer.
Piatti, B., & Hurni, L. (2011). Cartographies of fictional worlds. The Cartographic Journal, 48(4), 218–223.
Piper, K. (2002). Cartographic fictions: Maps, race, and identity. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.
Quinones, R. (1985). Mapping literary modernism: Time and development. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Radford, A. (2010). Mapping the Wessex novel: Landscape, history and the parochial in British literature, 1870–1940. London: Continuum.
Reuschel, A.-K., & Hurni, L. (2011). Mapping literature: Visualisation of spatial uncertainty in fiction. The Cartographic Journal, 48(4), 293–308.
Richterich, A. (2011). Cartographies of digital fiction: Amateurs mapping a new literary realism. The Cartographic Journal, 48(4), 237–249.
Sanders, J. (2011). The cultural geography of early modern drama, 1620–1650. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Sanford, R. (2002). Maps and memory in early modern England: A sense of place. New York: Palgrave.
Saunders, A. (2010). Literary geography: Reforging the connections. Progress in Human Geography, 34, 436–452.
Smith, N., & Katz, C. (1993). Grounding metaphor: Towards a spatialized politics. In M. Keith & S. Pile (Eds.), Place and the politics of identity (pp. 67–83). London: Routledge.
Soja, E. (1989). Postmodern geographies: The reassertion of space in critical social theory. London: Verso.
Sorum, E. (2009). “The place on the map”: Geography and meter in Hardy’s elegies. Modernism/Modernity, 16(3), 553–574.
Tally, Robert T., Jr. (Ed.). (2014). Literary cartographies: Spatiality, representation, and narrative. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Thacker, A. (2003). Moving through modernity: Space and geography in modernism. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Thacker, A. (2005–6). The idea of a critical literary geography. New Formations, 57, 56–73.
Thacker, A., & Brooker, P. (2005). Introduction. In A. Thacker & P. Brooker (Eds.), Geographies of modernism: Literatures, cultures, spaces (pp. 1–5). London: Routledge.
Torget, Andrew J., & Christensen, Jon. (2012). Mapping texts: Visualizing American historical newspapers. Journal of Digital Humanities, 1(3), 1–3.
Westphal, B. (2011 [2007]). Geocriticism: Real and fictional spaces. Translated by Robert T. Tally Jr. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Wimsatt Jr., W. K., & Beardsley, M. C. (1954). The intentional fallacy. In The verbal icon: Studies in the meaning of poetry (pp. 3–18). Lexington: University Press of Kentucky.
Wood, D., & Fels, J. (2009 [1986]). Designs on signs/myth and meaning in maps. In M. Dodge (Ed.), Classics in cartography: Reflections on influential articles from Cartographica (pp. 209–260). Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell.
Wood, D., & Krygier, J. (2009). Ce n’est pas la monde. In M. Dodge, R. Kitchin, & C. Perkins (Eds.), Rethinking maps: New frontiers in cartographic theory (pp. 189–219). London: Routledge.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2017 Springer Science+Business Media B.V.
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Frayn, A. (2017). “Now – Well, Look at the Chart”: Mapping, Maps and Literature. In: Brunn, S., Dodge, M. (eds) Mapping Across Academia. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-024-1011-2_13
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-024-1011-2_13
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Dordrecht
Print ISBN: 978-94-024-1009-9
Online ISBN: 978-94-024-1011-2
eBook Packages: Earth and Environmental ScienceEarth and Environmental Science (R0)