A wide-ranging, inter- and transdisciplinary approach grounded in the twin rigors of theory and history, which, through close readings assesses and analyses the significance of maps to literary texts, and which examines the ways in which the literary maps imaginary and real worlds.

This innovative collection of essays is focused on the idea of transmedialization: the ways that the traditional forms of the predominantly oral cultures of Scotland and Brittany (poetry, song and story) can be transformed by the use of hybrid forms and new digital technologies. The volume invites readers from a range of disciplines – music, art, literature, history, cultural memory studies, anthropology or media studies – to consider how an intermedial aesthetics of the edge can enable these distinctive cultures to thrive. The languages of both cultures are presently endangered and the essays seek to connect notions of language with a culture which can align its traditions with the concerns of the present day. The collection proceeds from a conceptual analysis of poetry film, peripheral vision and the concerns of peripheral communities to an examination of inventive practices in the film-poem, experimental video, film portrait, word-image, digitised music, sound-image and genre-contestant narratives. The collection also includes contributions from creative practitioners who utilize a range of hybrid forms to revitalize the traditional vernacular cultures of Scotland and Brittany. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, literature, film studies, media studies, music, cultural theory, and philosophy.

The Spacious Word explores the history of Iberian expansion into the Americas as seen through maps and cartographic literature, and considers the relationship between early Spanish ideas of the world and the origins of European colonialism. Spanish mapmakers and writers, as Padrón shows, clung to a much older idea of space that was based on the itineraries of travel narratives and medieval navigational techniques. Padrón contends too that maps and geographic writings heavily influenced the Spanish imperial imagination. During the early modern period, the idea of "America" was still something being invented in the minds of Europeans. Maps of the New World, letters from explorers of indigenous civilizations, and poems dramatizing the conquest of distant lands, then, helped Spain to redefine itself both geographically and imaginatively as an Atlantic and even global empire. In turn, such literature had a profound influence on Spanish ideas of nationhood, most significantly its own. Elegantly conceived and meticulously researched, The Spacious Word will be of enormous interest to historians of Spain, early modern literature, and cartography.

Working from a cultural studies perspective, author D. K. Smith here examines a broad range of medieval and Renaissance maps and literary texts to explore the effects of geography on Tudor-Stuart cultural perceptions. He argues that the literary representation of cartographically-related material from the late fifteenth to the early seventeenth century demonstrates a new strain, not just of geographical understanding, but of cartographic manipulation, which he terms, "the cartographic imagination." Rather than considering the effects of maps themselves on early modern epistemologies, Smith considers the effects of the activity of mapping-the new techniques, the new expectations of accuracy and precision which developed in the sixteenth century-on the ways people thought and wrote. Looking at works by Spenser, Marlowe, Raleigh, and Marvell among other authors, he analyzes how the growing ability to represent physical space accurately brought with it not just a wealth of new maps, but a new array of rhetorical techniques, metaphors, and associations which allowed the manipulation of texts and ideas in ways never before possible.

This book explores a new and innovative topic-the relationship between geographical advancements in the Mid-Tang period (790s to 820s) and spatial imaginaries in contemporaneous literature.

The relationship of texts and maps, and the mappability of literature, examined from Homer to Houellebecq. Literary authors have frequently called on elements of cartography to ground fictional space, to visualize sites, and to help readers get their bearings in the imaginative world of the text. Today, the convergence of digital mapping and globalization has spurred a cartographic turn in literature. This book gathers leading scholars to consider the relationship of literature and cartography. Generously illustrated with full-color maps and visualizations, it offers the first systematic overview of an emerging approach to the study of literature. The literary map is not merely an illustrative guide but represents a set of relations and tensions that raise questions about representation, fiction, and space. Is literature even mappable? In exploring the cartographic components of literature, the contributors have not only brought literary theory to bear on the map but have also enriched the vocabulary and perspectives of literary studies with cartographic terms. After establishing the theoretical and methodological terrain, they trace important developments in the history of literary cartography, considering topics that include Homer and Joyce, Goethe and the representation of nature, and African cartographies. Finally, they consider cartographic genres that reveal the broader connections between texts and maps, discussing literary map genres in American literature and the coexistence of image and text in early maps. When cartographic aspirations outstripped factual knowledge, mapmakers turned to textual fictions. Contributors Jean-Marc Besse, Bruno Bosteels, Patrick M. Bray, Martin Brückner, Tom Conley, Jörg Dünne, Anders Engberg-Pedersen, John K. Noyes, Ricardo Padrón, Barbara Piatti, Simone Pinet, Clara Rowland, Oliver Simons, Robert Stockhammer, Dominic Thomas, Burkhardt Wolf

Davies examines how Renaissance illustrated maps shaped ideas about peoples of the Americas, revealing relationships between civility, savagery and monstrosity.