ABSTRACT
Literary geography is a field of scholarly enquiry in which traditional disciplinary boundaries are tested and dismantled. This chapter introduces the reader to a range of recent and ongoing projects which digitally map – in various ways and to varying degrees – British Romantic writing. It sets out a pathway through a series of key digital literary geographical tropes and places those explorations – and anxieties – within wider scholarly contexts. Situated at the nexus of literary geography, digital humanities, critical cartography and neogeography, then the chapter focuses upon these Romantic projects to identify, stratify and clarify some of the cardinal manifestations of contemporary digital literary cartographic practice. It also focuses on digital literary cartographies designed to be accessed via desktop computers within the sheltered, sedentary spaces of libraries, offices and homes. The chapter indicates how such period-specific projects both explicitly and implicitly open up general thinking about what it might mean to practice literary mapping in the digital age.
