Abstract
Because of the longstanding popular interest in literary gazetteers such as Malcolm Bradbury’s Atlas of Literature, and more recently because of the wide-ranging impact of Franco Moretti’s 1998 Atlas of the European Novel 1800–1900, it is often assumed by nongeographers that literary geography must involve the making of maps. Indeed, for Moretti, the making of maps was the point: “You select a textual feature… find the data, put them on paper—and then you look at the map.”1 Literary maps have been used by literary cartographers in this way to connect stories with places and to express in two- dimensional visual form some of the spatial aspects of narratives. The “distant reading” approach characterized by Moretti’s Atlas relies on the collation of large amounts of quantitative data and works with accumulations of fictional settings, “textual features,” and plot events. It cannot, however, cover the whole range of what is possible for literary geography, not least because one of the drawbacks to conventional literary maps is the difficulty they have in dealing flexibly with distance. When story events are located on a fixed-scale map, relational (as opposed to literal) distances disappear, no matter how significant those variable distances are to the text; networks can only be represented as spread-out webs made up of connections linking points across literal distances, and the space-folding effects of technology and modes of modern communication become invisible.
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Notes
Franco Moretti, Atlas of the European Novel (London: Verso, 1998), 13.
Kitchin and Dodge, “Code and the Transduction of Space,” 162. See also Rob Kitchin and Martin Dodge, Code/Space: Software and Everyday Life (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011).
Nick Bingham, “Actor-Network Theory (ANT),” in The Dictionary of Human Geography, 5th ed., eds. Derek Gregory et al. (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), 6– 7.
John Law, “Introduction,” in Actor Network Theory and After, ed. John Law and John Hassard (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999), 1– 14.
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© 2014 Sheila Hones
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Hones, S. (2014). Distances. In: Literary Geographies. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137413130_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137413130_6
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
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