Sally Bushell

The Slipperiness of Literary Maps: Critical Cartography and Literary Cartography

ABSTRACT How we read and interpret a map when it is presented alongside the text in a work of fiction is the central issue with which this paper is concerned. Although “literary maps” can be found across a range of genres in literary studies, they are often treated as illustrative rather than being understood as integral to the meaning of the literary work. This article seeks to challenge such assumptions. The first half of the article is interdisciplinary, engaging with the work of J.B. Harley, Mark Monmonier, Franco Moretti, Christina Ljungberg, and Andrew Thacker in order to open up responses to literary maps in more complex ways. It draws on critical cartography to define core concerns for an emerging literary cartography, such as the nature of the analogy between map and text; the complexity of correspondence when a map and text occur alongside each other and the author is also the map-maker; and the difficulties created by naive users of the literary map. The second half of the article grounds the p...

Paratext or imagetext? Interpreting the fictional map

Abstract This article is concerned with the relationship between a fictional map and a fictional text and the way in which we understand and interpret that relationship. It explores visual–verbal relations (between map and text) through meaningful elements relating to the juxtaposition of these two forms within the covers of a book. Its primary interest is in determining the nature of the dynamic between map and text, arguing for a more integrated model of interpretation. The first part of the article, therefore, draws upon Gèrard Genette’s account of the paratext in order to consider to what extent the fictional map functions in a paratextual role. The article then explores the spatial and material relationship between map and text by applying Genette’s four key paratextual aspects—location, temporality, communication and function—to an analysis of the fictional map, with particular attention paid to two examples from Arthur Ransome and J. R. R. Tolkien. The article then reflects on the strengths and limits of this approach and incorporates the alternative offered by W. J. T. Mitchell’s formulation of the ‘imagetext’.