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. Literary Maps | GIMMS

This 1933 map
places authors and
their worksacross
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 MobyDickand Two Years
BeforetheMast, as well as regional works
referring to water features, such as Walden
Pond and TheDeepening Stream.

Henry David Thoreau
was keenly interested in
cartography. He
producedthis map of
Walden Pond, complete
with landmarks and
depths producedby
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
MobyDick.
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
Pequodsinks.

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
TheodoreDreiser
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, & Zora
Neale 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
Onthe Road

Chicago
Indiana’s TheodoreDreiser and
George Ade appearhere. Other
famous writers shown here include
MargaretAnderson, Saul Bellow,
Frank Norris, Upton Sinclair,
William Carlos Williams, and the
architectFrank Lloyd Wright.
Harriet Monroe’s little magazine
Poetryappearsat 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.

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, Zora
Neale 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
HuckleberryFinn 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

TwoVisionsof Batman’s
GothamCity
DC Comics asked Eliot
R. Brown to produce the
left map in preparation
for Batman: NoMan’s
Land, a story arc in
which an earthquake
hits the city.
The slightly different
right map was produced
for Christopher Nolan’s
DarkKnight trilogy.

This fan-generated map of
Panem, from the Hunger
Games books, was
meticulously plotted with
topographicinformation.
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, Talland
House near St. Ives, to Zennor, where she owned cottages later in life. Up right, on
Godrevy Island, is the lighthouse referencedin Woolf’s Tothe 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 Theatreso 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 Lordof the
Rings series

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
theChronotopein theNovel

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 DeVulgari
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 Brecht

Dostoyevsky’s
Saint Petersburg

Kafka’s Prague

Israeli literature

20th Century Arabic
world literature
Produceda few years
too early, an updated
map would almost
certainly also show
Marjane Satrapi’s
Persepolis (2000). Her
graphic novel takes
place in Iran during
and afterthe 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 Africain
colonial novels, none of which
accommodatethis regional economic
institution in their fiction.
According to Moretti, ignoring this fact
allowed these British novels to serve
British interests by envisioning Africaas
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.

Haruki
Murakami’s Hard-
Boiled
Wonderland and
theEnd ofthe
World uses this
map as its
frontispiece, a
subtle visual aid to
readers confused
by the novel’s
unorthodox
organization and
surprising
narrative conceit.

Literary maps slideshow

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