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This Element reconsiders what the focus of digital literary mapping should be for English Literature, what digital tools should be employed, and to what interpretative ends. How can we harness the digital to find new ways of understanding spatial meaning in the Humanities? The Element elucidates the relationship between literature, geography, and cartography and the emergence of literary mapping, providing a critique of current digital methods and making the case for new approaches. It explores the potential of Mikhail Bakhtin's 'chronotope' as a way of structuring digital literary maps that provides a solution to the complexities of mapping time and space. It exemplifies the method by applying it first as one of two approaches to mapping the realist novel by way of Dickens, and then to the multiple states of J. M. Barrie's Peter Pan. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
List of contents
1. Approaches to digital literary mapping; 2. Back to Bakhtin: understanding and applying a chronotopic method; 3. Towards a processual mapping method: evolving Neverland; 4. Conclusion; References.
Summary
This Element reconsiders what the focus of digital literary mapping should be for a subject like English Literature, what digital tools should be employed and to what interpretative ends. How we can harness the digital to find new ways of understanding spatial meaning in the Humanities? Section 1 provides a brief overview of the relationship between literature, geography and cartography and the emergence of literary mapping, providing a critique of current digital methods and making the case for new approaches. The second section turns to Russian theorist Mikhail Bakhtin and explores the potential of the 'chronotope' for literature as a way of structuring digital literary maps that provides a solution to the complexities of mapping time as well as space. Sections 3 and 4 then exemplify the method by applying it first to realist novels by Dickens and Hardy then the multiple states of J. M. Barrie's Peter Pan. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
Foreword
This Element explores new ways of mapping literary place and space through digital visualisations generated out of the text.
