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Literature and Cartography: Theories, Histories, Genres
The relationship of texts and maps, and the mappability of literature, examined from Homer to Houellebecq.
Literary authors have frequently called on elements of cartography to ground fictional space, to visualize sites, and to help readers get their bearings in the imaginative world of the text. Today, the convergence of digital mapping and globalization has spurred a cartographic turn in literature. This book gathers leading scholars to consider the relationship of literature and cartography. Generously illustrated with full-color maps and visualizations, it offers the first systematic overview of an emerging approach to the study of literature.
The literary map is not merely an illustrative guide but represents a set of relations and tensions that raise questions about representation, fiction, and space. Is literature even mappable? In exploring the cartographic components of literature, the contributors have not only brought literary theory to bear on the map but have also enriched the vocabulary and perspectives of literary studies with cartographic terms. After establishing the theoretical and methodological terrain, they trace important developments in the history of literary cartography, considering topics that include Homer and Joyce, Goethe and the representation of nature, and African cartographies. Finally, they consider cartographic genres that reveal the broader connections between texts and maps, discussing literary map genres in American literature and the coexistence of image and text in early maps. When cartographic aspirations outstripped factual knowledge, mapmakers turned to textual fictions.
Contributors: Jean-Marc Besse, Bruno Bosteels, Patrick M. Bray, Martin Brückner, Tom Conley, Jörg Dünne, Anders Engberg-Pedersen, John K. Noyes, Ricardo Padrón, Barbara Piatti, Simone Pinet, Clara Rowland, Oliver Simons, Robert Stockhammer, Dominic Thomas, Burkhardt Wolf
Literary authors have frequently called on elements of cartography to ground fictional space, to visualize sites, and to help readers get their bearings in the imaginative world of the text. Today, the convergence of digital mapping and globalization has spurred a cartographic turn in literature. This book gathers leading scholars to consider the relationship of literature and cartography. Generously illustrated with full-color maps and visualizations, it offers the first systematic overview of an emerging approach to the study of literature.
The literary map is not merely an illustrative guide but represents a set of relations and tensions that raise questions about representation, fiction, and space. Is literature even mappable? In exploring the cartographic components of literature, the contributors have not only brought literary theory to bear on the map but have also enriched the vocabulary and perspectives of literary studies with cartographic terms. After establishing the theoretical and methodological terrain, they trace important developments in the history of literary cartography, considering topics that include Homer and Joyce, Goethe and the representation of nature, and African cartographies. Finally, they consider cartographic genres that reveal the broader connections between texts and maps, discussing literary map genres in American literature and the coexistence of image and text in early maps. When cartographic aspirations outstripped factual knowledge, mapmakers turned to textual fictions.
Contributors: Jean-Marc Besse, Bruno Bosteels, Patrick M. Bray, Martin Brückner, Tom Conley, Jörg Dünne, Anders Engberg-Pedersen, John K. Noyes, Ricardo Padrón, Barbara Piatti, Simone Pinet, Clara Rowland, Oliver Simons, Robert Stockhammer, Dominic Thomas, Burkhardt Wolf
- GenresNonfictionGeography
480 pages, Hardcover
Published November 24, 2017
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About the author
Anders Engberg-Pedersen
15 booksAnders Engberg-Pedersen is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Southern Denmark and the author of Empire of Chance: The Napoleonic Wars and the Disorder of Things.
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
June 11, 2021
Well-edited. Presents a multi-faceted analysis of past, present, and near future challenges regarding literature and cartography, as well as some potential solution to the modern problem of the ubiquity of maps (and the loose application of terms like “mapping” in data systems).
Mostly, it poses the question: what is the future of cartography, both, in, as, and beyond, literature? Have our modern GPS-centered lives removed us from the territory by making maps so ubiquitous we forget we are “not really in them”, despite the marker which points to our “exact” location and direction, as orientation? And what does literature - past, modern, and contemporary - have to say about this folly of human perception and human reality?
Lastly, there are two wonderful pieces in this book by Ricardo Padrón and Dominic Thomas, regarding the American expansion of the Spanish empire and the urgent need for new cartographic technologies, and the deterritorialization and propaganda of the greater French empire (during the World Wars), which included many countries in Africa, respectively.
This book is not for the lay reader, and I can imagine anyone who doesn’t like constantly reading endnotes or looking up certain terminology will not have an enjoyable experience. For such a reader, I’d recommend starting with books like Daniel Harmon’s “Plotted: A Literary Atlas” or even Alberto Manguel’s “A History of Reading”. Alternatively, Jorge Luis Borges wrote a lot regarding maps, literature, and the limits of our cartographic reality.
Mostly, it poses the question: what is the future of cartography, both, in, as, and beyond, literature? Have our modern GPS-centered lives removed us from the territory by making maps so ubiquitous we forget we are “not really in them”, despite the marker which points to our “exact” location and direction, as orientation? And what does literature - past, modern, and contemporary - have to say about this folly of human perception and human reality?
Lastly, there are two wonderful pieces in this book by Ricardo Padrón and Dominic Thomas, regarding the American expansion of the Spanish empire and the urgent need for new cartographic technologies, and the deterritorialization and propaganda of the greater French empire (during the World Wars), which included many countries in Africa, respectively.
This book is not for the lay reader, and I can imagine anyone who doesn’t like constantly reading endnotes or looking up certain terminology will not have an enjoyable experience. For such a reader, I’d recommend starting with books like Daniel Harmon’s “Plotted: A Literary Atlas” or even Alberto Manguel’s “A History of Reading”. Alternatively, Jorge Luis Borges wrote a lot regarding maps, literature, and the limits of our cartographic reality.
September 23, 2022
This book is a collection of 16 academic essays on aspects of literature and cartography, exploring their connections and oppositions from the time of Homer through Goethe, James Joyce, and Borges to the present with it's computer simulations of warfare. The essays vary in their accessibility to general readers, but are rich in discoveries, ruminations, ideas, high quality reproductions of maps and texts and, most importantly, many intriguing bibliographic references. The book could serve as a syllabus for a semester of study of the literature/cartography interface.
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December 14, 2018809.93356 L7765 2017
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews