Reviewed by: Reading and Mapping Fiction: Spatialising the Literary Text by Sally Bushell Ann C. Colley (bio) Reading and Mapping Fiction: Spatialising the Literary Text, by Sally Bushell; pp. xvi + 335. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020, £75.00, $99.99. If any reader has consulted maps in the map room of the British Library or even visited Stanfords (established 1853), the variety inherent in the cartographic genre is evident and intriguing. Recently I examined late-eighteenth-century maps of the Lake District and was enthralled by the multiplicity of ways in which map makers had chosen to represent their subject. The genre’s complexity has now been extended for me by Sally Bushell’s Reading and Mapping Fiction: Spatialising the Literary Text, a study that not only [End Page 715] explores the relationship between the literary map (as opposed to actual maps) and the text to which it corresponds but also engages the larger questions concerning the extent to which we map as we read and how to represent this reality. This book takes the reader on a comprehensive journey that explores the unique relationship between the literary map and the text in which it appears. Maintaining that “an experience of literary space is not the same as the mapping of the real world,” Bushell demonstrates just how fictional maps are not, as some mistakenly maintain, a mere illustration (91). She opens her study by contextualizing (almost exhaustively) her work within a review of ideas about the nature of mapping. She then offers a historical sense of the interdisciplinary relationships among literature, geography, and cartography from the twelfth to the nineteenth century. When constructing this frame, Bushell assembles voices of commentators that, although informative, almost overwhelm the opening chapter. I was impressed by Bushell’s grasp of this context yet wished to hear the guidance of her own voice. But that is to come, particularly when she addresses the question of how mapping is crucial to the interpretive part of reading fiction. Bushell raises interesting points throughout. She explores the possibility that a map cannot necessarily be trusted: it can manipulate a reader as well as the characters within the fiction. Moreover, her point that the literary map becomes a means by which fiction attempts to escape its own fictionality is suggestive. Furthermore, Bushell shows how a fictitious map is duplicitous: it faces outward to the reader and, at the same time, is present for the characters who are negotiating their sense of place. In addition, Bushell periodically returns to the paradox between the fixed, retrospective map and the sequential movement of a narrative. For those interested in Victorian fiction, Bushell devotes a significant part of the book to the integral function of literary maps within specific genres in the nineteenth century. In her words, these maps draw “attention to the fact that they are not intended to function in the same way as actual maps of the world” (91). To illustrate this experience, Bushell discusses the nature and use of fictional maps in such adventure and spy texts as Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island (1883), H. Rider Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines (1885), Erskine Childers’s The Riddle of the Sands (1903), and John Buchan’s Prester John (1910). She demonstrates the ways in which the literary map is a dynamic part of, yet exterior to, the text. These characteristics and the importance of spatial orientation are also at work in the detective fiction of the 1920s and 1930s. In the novels of Dorothy Sayers, Margery Allingham, Ngaio Marsh, Edmund Crispin, and Agatha Christie, the mapping is really based upon what Bushell terms “a human geography” that charts the human network of the mystery (128). It appears to be trustworthy and map the crime scene, yet often misleads and preys upon the gullibility of the reader. In this way, the act of mapping counters the genre’s supposedly objective form. After discussing the function of the map in adventure, spy, and detective fiction, Bushell turns her attention to maps in children’s fiction. She explores the map-text relationship in such works as Arthur Ransome’s Lake District series and J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit...
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Jun 28, 2023
Daniel Cristea-Enache 
Open Access