Poet as Literary Cartographer: Literary Cartography in Elizabeth Bishop’s “The Map”

Abstract

ABSTRACT Scholars tend to focus on Bishop’s sense of place, travel writing, and geographical feelings, yet few scholars examine her role as a literary cartographer. This article explores Bishop’s literary cartography considering her obsession with mapping and exploration. But Bishop also carefully revises the mapmaker’s task to define possibilities for imaginative reversals of cartographic practices. We concentrate on the imaginative logic motivating her implicit contrast between “The Map” and “A Map.”