Reading and Mapping Fiction

Spatialising the Literary Text

Sally Bushell

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9781108487450
• eBook ISBN:
  9781108809788
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism Theory
• Index: Literature

Do we map as we read? How central to our experience of literature is the way in which we spatialise and visualise a fictional world? Reading and Mapping Fiction offers a fresh approach to the interpretation of literary space and place centred upon the emergence of a fictional map alongside the text in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Bringing together a range of new and emerging theories, including cognitive mapping and critical cartography, Bushell compellingly argues that this activity, whatever it is called – mapping, diagramming, visualising, spatialising – is a vital and intrinsic part of how we experience literature, and of what makes it so powerful. Drawing on both the theory and history of literature and cartography, this richly illustrated study opens up understanding of spatial meaning and interpretation in new ways that are relevant to both more traditional academic scholarship and to newly emerging digital practices.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title
• Title page
• Copyright information
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 A Shifting Relationship: From Literary Geography to Critical Literary Mapping
• 2 Historicising the Fictional Map
• 3 Doubleness and Silence in Adventure and Spy Fiction
• 4 Mapping Murder
• 5 Playspace: Spatialising Children's Fiction
• 6 Mapping Worlds: Tolkien's Cartographic Imagination
• 7 Fearing the Map: Representational Priorities and Referential Assumptions
• 8 Reading As Mapping, or, What Cannot Be Visualised
• Bibliography
• Index