Reading and Mapping Fiction
Spatialising the Literary Text

This book explores the power of the map in fiction and its centrality to meaning, from Treasure Island to Winnie-the-Pooh.

Sally Bushell (Author)

9781108487450, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 2 July 2020

350 pages
25 x 17.5 x 2.2 cm, 0.84 kg

'… this monograph offers an innovative method for understanding the literature and maps of the long-nineteenth century, original ways of reading the century's new and dominant genres, an explanation of what happens to us when we encounter maps in novels as readers, and a guide to the possibilities of future digital humanities projects.' Sophie Welsh, Romance, Revolution and Reform

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.

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.

Subject Areas: Cartography, map-making & projections [RGV], Literary studies: fiction, novelists & prose writers [DSK], Literary studies: from c 1900 - [DSBH], Literary studies: c 1800 to c 1900 [DSBF], Literary theory [DSA]