Making connections between literature local history and culture

‘Making connections between literature, local history, and culture: Introducing the Literary Atlas of Wales’. Professor Jon Anderson School of Geography and Planning, Cardiff University andersonj@cf. ac. uk Literary. Atlas. wales

‘the geography of fiction’ (following Piatti and Hurni, 2011, in the tradition of Moretti, 1998) “developments in this field were primarily predicated upon the mapping and spatial analysis of quantitative sources using social science approaches” (Gregory and Cooper 2013: 266) “You choose a unit [from the fiction] – walks, lawsuits, luxury goods, whatever – find its occurrences, [and] place them in space. . . in other words: you reduce the text to a few elements, and abstract them from the narrative flow, and construct a new, artificial object” (Moretti, 2005: 53, emphasis in original).

from ‘distant’ to ‘Deep Geography’ (Harris, 2015: 28) “Geography is massive forces and being part of a bigger picture” (Conran, Pigeon, 2016: 120) “I opt for the term deep geography to encompass deep mapping, spatial storytelling, and spatial narrative” (Harris, 2015: 28) “limn a matrix of communal and personal memory, competing histories, and polyvocal narrative” (Naramore Maher 2014: XIV) “Like a literary survey team, [deep cartographers] map multiple measures. Inspired by geologists, [they] create cross-sectional narratives of natural history, illuminating the strata in which deep time and human time collide…. Following cultural geographers, they mark the shifts and migrations, booms and busts, erasures and additions, always keeping an eye open for the palimpsests of formerworlds”. (ibid. : 15)