'Narrative Cartography in the Eighteenth Century: Defoe's Exploration of Great-Britain in the Tour'
| Autor: | Peraldo, Emmanuelle |
|---|---|
| Přispěvatelé: | Peraldo, Emmanuelle, Tijana Rakic & Jacky Tivers, Institut d'Etudes Transtextuelles et Transculturelles (IETT), Université Jean Moulin - Lyon 3 (UJML), Université de Lyon-Université de Lyon |
| Jazyk: | angličtina |
| Rok vydání: | 2012 |
| Předmět: | |
| Zdroj: | Narratives of Travel and Tourism Tijana Rakic & Jacky Tivers. Narratives of Travel and Tourism, Ashgate, pp.97-108, 2012 |
| Popis: | The Tour thro' the whole Island of Great-Britain (1724-25-26) is a domestic travel narrative, written in the form of thirteen letters that describe a region of Great-Britain each and Defoe uses different tools in order to think and represent the English space, one of which being the map - real or narrative. This chapter wants to show how Defoe, a lifelong student of geography, manages to narrate the English space through cartography, chorography and fiction, and what this intermingling between geographic and literary tools bring to his travel account. Indeed, it is through his geographical imagination that Defoe manages to give the most graphic contemporary account of the state of Great-Britain in the first part of the eighteenth century. Like many others of his texts, Defoe's Tour is full of lists, tables, figures and very accurate descriptions; it has even been considered as "a mere storebin of data" by Terence Bowers . The traveller-writer is afraid of the void, a bit like cartographers at the time, who filled in the blanks of their maps by ferocious beasts or by fish. This survey of Great-Britain is exhaustive as can be seen in the abundance of toponyms, but also in the tables, sketches or maps inserted in the text. All these elements borrowed from cartography or geography help Defoe give a visual representation of his ideas when his written descriptions are not enough. His use of cartography is part of a larger representational strategy, as it brings authority and authenticity to his text, and he goes even further by using narration in order to map England. Not only does Defoe display an expert's ability to put into practice the procedures of map reading and construction, but he also creates narrative maps. After having analysed the Tour as a map in the first section to see if Defoe can be considered as a geographer or, as Christopher Parkes puts it, as "a mere dabbler in the field of geography" , this chapter will focus on the interconnectedness between geography and literature and on the literariness of the Tour, analysing how space is text and how Defoe stages space in his narrative maps ("mise en scène") using metaphors and other narrative and thematic tools. This chapter will end on a reflection on mapping and writing as acts of power ( in so far as they are part of a process of appropriation of space in order to promote it economically and geopolitically) making Defoe the architect of the modern Great-Britain. |
| Databáze: | OpenAIRE |
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