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 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.