New Approaches for Digital Literary Mapping

This Element explores new ways of mapping literary place and space through digital visualisations generated out of the text.

This Element explores the role of digital literary mapping in English Literature, critiquing current methods and proposing new approaches. It critiques current digital methods and explores the 'chronotope' method by Mikhail Bakhtin, which can structure digital maps for time and space. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.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.