Literary maps slideshow

“A Pictorial Chart of American

Literature,” 1932, shows 19 female

writers at top and 19 male writers at

bottom, along with important

historical events on the side borders.

Literary Maps | GIMMS

Maps allow us to investigate literature in unique ways, visually situating writers and their works in geography and history.


This 1933 map places authors and their works across

the nation.

Although not yet a state, Alaska

Territory is prominently

included.


This inset from the previous map proclaims New England to be “The Birthplace of

American Literature,” pointing out authors’ homes and the settings of various works.

The map helps explain the prominence of seafaring tales in the early period of American

literature, noting Moby Dick and Two Years Before the Mast, as well as regional works

referring to water features, such as Walden Pond and The Deepening Stream.


Henry David Thoreau was keenly interested in

cartography. He produced this map of

Walden Pond, complete with landmarks and depths produced by

soundings. Published in the first (1854) edition of

Walden; or , Life in the Woods, it has peculiarly been omitted from many

modern editions.



This map depicts the voyage of Captain

Ahab’s ship in Herman Meville’s

Moby Dick.

In addition to the detailed

illustrations, the map’s locations help readers comprehend

the vastness of the journey and

Ishmael’s profound desolation when the

Pequod sinks.

Transatlantic journeys in Henry James’ novels: the author often sends his protagonists from America to Europe, taking them from innocence to experience.



Greenwich Village, New York City,

1920s

Indiana’s own Theodore Dreiser

appears in various places. Also notable

are Willa Cather, e.e. cummings, Henry

James, Jack London, and Upton Sinclair.


The Harlem Renaissance, named after the Manhattan neighborhood, was a huge

outpouring of African-American publications and

musical or theatrical performances.

From 1917 to at least the mid-1930s, this was a primary

cultural hub for the increased northward migration. James

Baldwin, Countee Cullen, W.E.B. DuBois, Ralph Ellison,

Langston Hughes, & ZoraNeale Hurston are on this map, along with famous

musical venues and theaters.



With a highly simplified map of Manhattan and two-thirds of its space

devoted to portraits and information, this map certainly assumes readers as its

audience.




“Classical” Hollywood, of the 1930s-1940s Literary Maps | GIMMS


Literary San Francisco

This map fills each outlined neighborhood or park with an

associated quote.


Travels of Dean Moriarty,

protagonist of Jack Kerouac’s

On the Road



ChicagoIndiana’s Theodore Dreiser and

George Ade appear here. Other famous writers shown here include Margaret Anderson, Saul Bellow,

Frank Norris, Upton Sinclair, William Carlos Williams, and the

architect Frank Lloyd Wright.

Harriet Monroe’s little magazine Poetry appears at the lower left. Her publication helped usher in

the Modernist poetry style, as well as works in translation such as

those by Rabindranath Tagore, who won a Nobel Prize the year

after appearing in Poetry.Literary Maps | GIMMS





Faulkner’s hand-drawn map of the locations covered in his novels

Standard map of the same locale


Literature of the slave-holding states

Frederick Douglass appears in Maryland, ZoraNeale Hurston in Florida, and Richard Wright’s birthplace in Mississippi is shown, although he

later lived in Memphis and Chicago.

Rivers feature prominently in Southern literature that deals with slaves, as they

represent legal borders as well as corridors for travel. Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote Uncle

Tom’s Cabin in outrage at the scenes she saw across the Ohio River, and Mark Twain’s

Huckleberry Finn is motivated in part by Jim and Huck traveling the Mississippi River after

missing its junction with the Ohio, which would have led the pair to free states.



Mark Twain’s Huckleberry

Finn primarily

takes place along the

Mississippi River.


Contemporary African-American literature (as of 1996) Literary Maps | GIMMS


Two Visions of Batman’s Gotham City


DC Comics asked Eliot R. Brown to produce the left map in preparation

for Batman: No Man’s Land, a story arc in

which an earthquake hits the city.

The slightly different right map was produced for Christopher Nolan’s

Dark Knight trilogy.

This fan-generated map of Panem, from the Hunger

Games books, was meticulously plotted with topographic information.

The mappers supply copious details—but also

spoilers!—on their livejournal pages about their process of creating

this map.


Caribbean literature




In the fairy tale of Cinderella […] versions containing the gathering of bones are documented in China, Vietnam, India,

Russia, Bulgaria, Cyprus, Serbia, Dalmatia, Sicily, Sardinia, Provence, Brittany, Lorraine,

Scotland, and Finland. So immense and varied a distribution precludes the

possibility that the presence of this theme in the fable’s plot is the result of a casual graft. A further hypothesis is permissible: namely,

that the version which includes the resurrection of the killed animal is the more

complete one.

— Carlo Ginzburg, Ecstasies





Washington Irving’s travels in Europe



As the inset text explains, all the “wrong” erotic choices of the 19th century British bildungsroman involve a woman

who is French or has received a French education.

Villains and Seducers, or the 19th Century British Literary View of France and Europe


World War II literary sites in Europe, North Africa, and

the Middle East


Literature of World War II set

in the Pacific


Map of a walk around Tintagel, a site long associated with King Arthur’s castle Literary Maps | GIMMS


The literary efforts of authors like Joseph Conrad and Rudyard Kipling helped produce Britain as “the empire upon which the sun never sets” in its national imagination.

Literature of the British Empire



Lake District, England, and the Romantics



Jane Austen’s Southern England


Jane Austen’s Bath


Important places from Jane Austen’s life in Steventon, Hampshire Literary Maps | GIMMS

Walking tour of Jane Austen’s Bath Literary Maps | GIMMS


Charles Dickens’ London


Sherlock Holmes’ London Unlike Doyle’s first two novels, which take place mostly south of the Thames, the short stories from 1891 onwards mostly focus on

the West End and the City. The short stories were far more immediately popular

than the novels. Holmes’ success may be due to the shift in location to what the

public saw as the “right” space for detectives.



This map shows the locations of Holmes

mysteries around England and within

London

A favorite walk of Virginia Woolf’s family from their holiday residence, TallandHouse near St. Ives, to Zennor, where she owned cottages later in life. Up right, on

Godrevy Island, is the lighthouse referenced in Woolf’s To the Lighthouse. Literary Maps | GIMMS

The Bloomsbury neighborhood of London is famed for modernist authors like T.S.

Eliot, E.M. Forster, Wyndham Lewis, Virginia Woolf, and W.B. Yeats.

Having the British Museum & Library, University College, the University of

London, and Bloomsbury Theatre so close could not have hurt their shared sense of

worldliness.



Tolkien, who wrote The Hobbit and The Lord of the

Rings series, lived in Britain’s second-most populous city,

Birmingham


Another map of Tolkien’s Middle Earth from The

Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings series


Ireland


18th Century Literary Dublin

The map shows authors such as Edmund Burke, Thomas Moore, and Jonathan Swift, as well as some of their notable haunts like The Bleeding Horse pub and Brazen Head.


In the Waverley novels […] there is a three-estate time-line, running from a civilized estate […] up the

king’s highway to a semi-civilized estate (or the “Lowland estate” at the base of a “formidable

topographical barrier,” and finally over the barrier to a fully-feudal estate (or the “Highland estate,” the realm of Fergus, Burley, or Rob Roy). […] The final

marriage between the Waverley hero (who has had Hanoverian political ties) and the Jacobite heiress does not cross the novel’s topographical barrier. […]

Scottish culture, in the form of the Lowland estate, is incorporated into the nation, but Scottish political

nationalism is left in the past, on the other side of the topographical barrier.

— David Lipscomb, Geographies of Progress


There is no European nation, which, within the course of half a century, or little more, has undergone so complete a

change as this kingdom of Scotland. The effects of the insurrection of 1745, – the destruction of the patriarchal

power of the Highland chiefs, – the abolition of the heritable jurisdiction of the Lowland nobility and barons,

– the total eradication of the Jacobite party, which, averse to intermingle with the English, or adopt their

customs, long continued to pride themselves upon maintaining ancient Scottish manners and costumes, –

commenced this innovation. The graduate influx of wealth, and extension of commerce, have since united to render the present people of Scotland a class of beings as different from their grandfathers, as the existing English

are from those of Queen Elizabeth’s time.

— Walter Scott, “A Postscript,” Waverley


Literary places of Scandinavia


Paris of the French Enlightenment – note Voltaire, Rousseau, and the Bastille



Paris, 1920s


Paris as bohemia



Encounters in a novel usually take place “on the road.” The Road is a particularly good place for random encounters. On the road, the spatial and temporal paths of the most varied people […] intersect at one spatial and temporal point. People who are normally kept separate by social and spatial distance can accidentally meet; any contrast may crop up, the most varied fates may collide and interweave with one another.

— Mikhail Bakhtin, Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel


Spanish Civil War

This map shows battles, the various involvements of authors, and settings of

novels and short stories.

Among the authors are John Dos Passos, Ernest Hemingway, Langston Hughes, Pablo Neruda,

George Orwell, and Jean-Paul Sartre.


Dante’s Italy, showing the places in which he lived or

traveled.

The colored dots show the towns he discusses in De Vulgari

Eloquentia, with split explained by the Appienne mountain

range in the middle.



Berlin in the 1920s was a cosmopolitan, bohemian center, with authors like Bertolt BrechtLiterary Maps | GIMMS


Dostoyevsky’s Saint Petersburg


Kafka’s Prague


Israeli literature


20th Century Arabic world literature

Produced a few years too early, an updated map would almost certainly also show Marjane Satrapi’sPersepolis (2000). Her graphic novel takes place in Iran during and after the Islamic revolution, and takes its title from the ancient capital of the Persian Empire.



Franco Moretti uses this map of the northern African trade routes to critique the English depictions of North Africa in

colonial novels, none of which accommodate this regional economic

institution in their fiction.

According to Moretti, ignoring this fact allowed these British novels to serve

British interests by envisioning Africa as an unrefined resource rather than a land with histories and economies of its own.


Literature of southern Japan

The inset shows Kenzaburo Oe’s

home village, Uchiko-chou.


HarukiMurakami’s Hard-

Boiled Wonderland and

the End of the World uses this

map as its frontispiece, a

subtle visual aid to readers confused

by the novel’s unorthodox

organization and surprising

narrative conceit.


Education

Literary maps slideshow