LITERARY CARTOGRAPHY: MAP AS A PARATEXTUAL ELEMENT IN BRITISH CHILDREN’S LITERATURE
DOI: 10.23951/2312-7899-2021-2-28-42
Since one of the first representations of the Earth in “The Map Psalter”, marine maps from the Age of Discovery and the first literary atlases, maps have held a special place in British culture. Since the map of the Treasure Island, which is considered to be a pioneer of the kind, from Robert Louis Stevenson’s novel of the same name, maps have always played a significant role in British children’s literature. A literary map, especially a map in children’s books, is an important paratextual element. Although the roles and functions of maps may vary greatly, the place of a map (most frequently it is an endpaper or a frontispiece) makes literary cartography the first visual element for the reader, which enables a map to set the setting, genre, and particular audience expectations. The fact that it is not an obligatory element of a book makes the presence of a map in a book an essential part of the author’s artistic vision and a key (para)textual element of the book. The five maps from the classic books written for younger readers between 1883 and 1926 may prove that maps perform multiple functions and play a greater role than that of beautiful drawings on frontispieces. The maps are the 17th-century marine map of the imaginary island from Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island; the actual map of India from Rudyard Kipling’s Kim; the map of Kensington Gardens presumably drawn by a child from James M. Barrie’s Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens; the map of the Thames Valley inhibited by anthropomorphic animals from Kenneth Graham’s The Wind in the Willows. The analysis of these maps’ paratextual powers and textual-visual interactions leads to the conclusion that the five literary maps from the classic children’s books of the Golden Age period reveal the five potential ways of interaction between the textual and the visual: map as a plot device, map as a document, map as a narrator, map as the transcendent, and map as memory, correspondingly. The conclusion poses the following questions: What happens to maps during the act of translation from English into Russian or any other language? Is it possible to translate cartography? How crucial is the omission of a map? The answers to these questions are yet to be discovered.
Keywords: literary map, paratext, illustration, children’s literature, visual culture, translation
References:
Barrie, J. M. (1991). Peter Pan In Kensington Gardens. Oxford University Press.
Barrie, J. M. (2000). Farewell Miss Julie Logan: A Barrie Omnibus. Canongare Classics.
Berlyant, A. M. (2002). Kartografiya [Cartography]. Aspekt Press.
Carroll, J. S. (2012). Landscape in children’s literature. Routledge.
Cuttet-Mackenzie, A., Payne, P. G., & Reid, A. (2011). Experiencing environment and place through children’s literature. Routledge.
Desmarais, J. (2017). The Wind in the Willows. The Literary Encyclopedia. https://www.literaryencyclopaedia.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=13229
Doughty, T., & Thompson, D. (2011). Knowing their place? Identity and space in children’s literature. Cambridge Scholars.
Druker, E. (2012). Mapping absence: Maps as meta-artistic discourse in literature. In L. Dahlberg (Ed.), Visualizing law and authority: Essays on legal aesthetics (pp. 114–125). De Gruyter.
Goga, N., & Kümmerling-Meibauer, B. (2017). Maps and mapping in children’s literature. landscapes, seascapes and cityscapes. John Benjamins Publishing Company.
Graham, K. (1983). The Wind in the Willows. Scribner.
Hammond, J. R. (1984). A Robert Louis Stevenson companion. Palgrave Macmillan.
Kipling, R. (1942). Kim. MacMillan and Co. Ltd.
Kümmerling-Meibauer, B., & Meibauer, J. (2013). Towards a cognitive theory of picturebooks. International Research in Children’s Literature, 6, 143–160.
Kuntina, A. (2020). Vini-Pukh v sovetskikh knizhkakh [Winnie the Pooh in Soviet books]. https://www.culture.ru/materials/253032/vinni-pukh-v-sovetskikh-knizhkakh
Lowne, C. (2018). Winnie-the-Pooh. Encyclopedia Britannica. https://www.britannica.com/topic/Winnie-the-Pooh-childrens-stories-by-Milne
Massey, D. (2005). For Space. Sage.
Mendlesohn, F. (2008). Rhethorics of fantasy. Wesleyan.
Mitchell, P. (2011). Cartographic strategies of postmodernity. The figure of the map in contemporary theory and fiction. Routledge.
Nikolajeva, M., & Sarole, S. (2000). The dynamics of picturebook communication. Children’s Literature in Education, 31(4), 225–239.
Orlova, G. (2008). Sovetskaya kartografiya v stalinskuyu epokhu: detskaya versiya [Soviet cartography in the Stalin era: Children’s version]. Interlos, 2. http://www.intelros.ru/readroom/nz/nz_58/2392-sovetskaja-kartografija-v-stalinskuju.html
Pavlik, A. (2010). A special kind of reading game: Maps in children’s literature. International Research in Children’s Literature, 3(1), 28–43.
Philips, R. (1994). Mapping men & empire. A geography of adventure. Routledge.
Ranson, C. (1995). Cartography in children’s literature. Sustaining the vision. Selected Papers from the Annual Conference of the International Association of School Librarianship. https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED400859.pdf
Stevenson, R. L. (1896). My first book: Treasure island. https://digital.nls.uk/99381994
Stevenson, R. L. (1999). Ostrov sokrovishch [Treasure island]. Translated from English. Terra.
( 2.01 MB ) 
( 2 MB )
Issue: 2, 2021
Series of issue: Issue 2
Rubric: ARTICLES
Pages: 28 — 42
Downloads: 1029