Mapping Victorian Empires, Cultures, Identities: Introduction

This special issue of Partial Answers follows in the wake of a four-day conference on mapping and literature–"Mapping Victorian Empires, Cultures, Identities." In May 2019, over 50 delegates from no fewer than 10 countries gathered in Jerusalem and Haifa to discuss long-19th-century, Victorian, and post-Victorian literary mappings, settings, journeys, and locales. Some of the speakers expanded their talks into the essays presented in this volume. The introduction asks what it is about maps that makes them literary, poetic, and symbolic texts. Maps are notoriously biased because of political and economic agendas and epistemological conventions, and they are inevitably skewed, even if only because they project a global object onto a flat page. Yet poetic maps, unlike scientific ones, acknowledge and savor this slanted gaze.

The introduction analyzes fictional mappings as a poetic device and suggests that in works of literature, maps–commonly taken to provide access to a concrete physical reality–tend to serve as imaginary spaces for rethinking geographies, identities, and cultures. Poetic maps conceptualize geographical reality as an attribute of the mind, giving shape and structure to the interiority and establishing a critical distance from empirical conventions of space.