Critical Literary Cartography: Text, Maps and a Coleridge Notebook

Abstract

In their edited collection, Envisioning Landscapes, Making Worlds, Stephen Daniels and his colleagues bring together 29 transdisciplinary essays which exemplify ‘the recent resurgence of intellectual interplay between geography and the humanities’ (Richardson 2011: xix). Collectively, these papers showcase the pluralistic ways in which contemporary geographical theory has enriched the spatial thinking of scholars working across the arts and humanities. At the same time, the contributions highlight ‘the reciprocal process’ by which arts and humanities research has ‘helped initiate changes in geography itself, stretching its traditional boundaries and applications in new directions’ (ibid.: xix). Tofacilitate identification of the key tropes within the dynamic interdisciplinary field of ‘geohumanities’, the editors codify four overlapping and intersecting ‘modes of knowing the world’ which ’frame specific geographical practices’: reflecting, representing, performing and mapping (Daniels et al. 2011: xxx).¹ In introducing the last of these four cardinal themes, Daniels et al. indicate how mapping, ‘as a term of cultural description in the arts and humanities has moved beyond the practice of cartography to a broader, metaphorical sense of interpreting and creating images and texts and of making sense of a fast modernizing or post-modernizing of this world’ (Daniels et al. 2011: xxx).