Please join us for CuSPP Seminar in person (ADH Conference room) and online on Thursday, 8 August from 1-2pm. Please refer to the CuSPP email or email Wesley.Lim@anu.edu.au for the link.

This paper presents new ways of mapping literature by means of digital tools for the Twenty-First Century emerging from a major funded project for mapping literary timespace (Chronotopic Cartographies).  It argues for the mapping of space relationally in non-referential ways by means of “literary topology”.  It articulates an integrated visual-verbal method of interpretation that combines the close reading of spatial meanings and structures within a text with analysis of the map series generated out of that same text, in an iterative structure.  The second half of the paper puts theory into practice through a visual-verbal reading of Lewis Carroll’s Through The Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There.

Sally Bushell is Professor of Romantic and Victorian Literature in the Department of English Literature & Creative Writing, Lancaster University in the UK.  She is currently a Visiting Professor at ANU funded by the RSHA.  Her research is concerned with literary spatiality and the mapping of texts in a range of ways (across process; empirically; digitally). She is also interested in digital and spatial projects for the mapping of literature. She was PI on the AHRC Funded project: Chronotopic Cartographies and the AHRC Follow On Fund project Steampunk Sherlock Holmes in Minecraft. She co-creator of an educational project (Litcraft) that re-engages reluctant readers with reading by using Minecraft to map literary worlds.  Her most recent books are: Reading and Mapping: Spatialising The Text (Cambridge, 2020) and New Approaches to Digital Literary Mapping: Chronotopic Cartography (Forthcoming, Cambridge Elements series, 2024).