List of Figures. Acknowledgements. Introduction: Orienting, Disorienting the Novel 1. On Getting Oriented 2. Melville's Zig-Zag World-Circle 3. Joyce's Geodesy 4. Pynchon's Baedeker Trick 5. On Getting Lost Notes. Bibliography. Index

This report focuses on the growing interest in the relationship between maps, narratives and meta-narratives. Following a brief historical contextualization of these relationships, this report explores their current state in the Geoweb era. Using the distinction between story maps and grid maps as an analytical framework, I review emerging issues around the extensive use of technologies and online mapping services (i.e. Google maps) to convey stories and to produce new ones. Drawing on literature in film studies, literary studies, visual arts, computer science and communication I also emphasize the emergence of new forms of spatial expressions interested in providing different perspectives about places and about stories associated to places. In sum, I argue that mapping both vernacular knowledge and fiction is central understanding places in depth.

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https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/0309132511423796

Novels, Maps, Modernity: The Spatial Imagination, 1850–2000

Cartography I Mapping narrative cartography

The long superficial engagement of literary scholars with the cartographic lexicon (under the label of literary ‘spatial turn’) has led to a need for a ‘recartographization’ of the field. This tendency, however, still remains primarily embedded within analytical (‘cartography of literature’) or critical (‘critical literary cartography’) approaches, and fails to engage the recent development of post-representational rethinking of maps. Literary criticism, with its creative use of mapping words, and, above all, literary texts, with their involvement of practising maps, should be reconsidered as relevant sources for cartographic theorization and mapping research.

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/0309132513510587

Theorizing maps with literature

Arts and Humanities Research Council Doctoral Studentship
Arts and Humanities Research Council International Placement Scheme Award
British Research Councils Fellowship at the U.S. Library of Congress

Mobile Holmes : Sherlockiana, travel writing and the co-production of the Sherlock Holmes stories

Narratives and places are deeply connected. Places often contribute to the shaping of a story, just as stories contribute to the production of spatial identities. Mapping narratives can thus have a double goal: to explore the geographic structure of a story, and to better understand the impact of stories on the production of places. While it may be easy to locate narratives as points on a map, this type of representation is rarely relevant in capturing and characterising the complex spatio-temporal dimensions of the narratives. In this paper, we present a cyber-cartographic application designed to address this issue and provide solutions to help properly map some of the many dimensions of narratives, including the places of the narration (geography), the connection between these places (geometry), as well as the temporal dimension inherent to storytelling. This application, originally developed to map contemporary Canadian cinematographic narratives (see examples here: http://scaquard.classone-tech.com/),...

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/17445647.2013.847387

How can we map stories? A cybercartographic application for narrative cartography

This research uses literary resources as evidence against the argument that names are potentially semantically meaningless entities. A secondary goal is to highlight and discuss the value of onomastics from both a literary and linguistic perspective. The thesis proposes a methodology for the assessment of literary sources based on genre, arguing that names, and genre in turn, may be defined through their respective engagement with thematic considerations, providing a relevant critical structure by which to assess the application or construction of names within fiction.
The proposed methodology is first used to assess the placenames within dystopian literature, taking Orwell’s 1984 (1949), Huxley’s Brave New World (1931), and Zamyatin’s We (1924) as exemplar texts for the genre. The emblematic themes identified within the onymic patterns (propaganda, classification and regulation) all share a common thematic root: power and control. In order to assess the validity of this approach, the fictional worlds depicted in a selection of other dystopic texts are also examined. A special study is made of terrapsychology and fictional ontology, as well as of three distinct subgenres of the gothic. Case studies of the latter are each focused around a different ontological mode (fictional, part-fictional, and non-fictional placenames), covering the fantastic world of Peake’s Gormenghast setting (two texts published in 1946 and 1950), Lovecraft’s variant New England county (six texts, 1922 to 1936), and the representative contemporary setting of Brook’s World War Z (2006), respectively.

Novels, Maps, Modernity: The Spatial Imagination, 1850–2000

Citations

Cartography I Mapping narrative cartography

Theorizing maps with literature

Mobile Holmes : Sherlockiana, travel writing and the co-production of the Sherlock Holmes stories

How can we map stories? A cybercartographic application for narrative cartography

Name, place, and emotional space : themed semantics in literary onomastic research

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