Introduction

What would a ‘geography of modernism’ look like? One possibility would be a map, or series of maps, such as those found in Malcolm Bradbury’s The Atlas of Literature (1996), which impressively charts the ‘modern world’ from Kafka’s Prague to Faulkner’s New South, and from Joyce’s Dublin to Greenwich Village. Much can be gleaned from these maps about the intimate connections between cultural texts and geographical location, but perhaps the very impulse to map cultural activity is itself worthy of further analysis. Any map of modernism would provoke questions from geographers alert to the discourse of cartography as embedded in structures of power. As J. B. Harley states, ‘Cartographers manufacture power: they create a spatial panopticon’ (1996: 439). Maps should be regarded, like all ‘practices of representation’, as ‘situated, embodied, partial’ (Gregory 1994: 7; and see GoGwilt 1998); they signify different or opposed meanings through their choice of cartographic projection, type of coloration or employment of scale.