ABSTRACT
In an essay published in The Guardian in April 2014, Rachel Hewitt offered a lament for the declining popularity of the Ordnance Survey paper map: an elegy which was predicated on both an unapologetic nostalgia for remembered places and an understandable celebration of the tactility and texturality of the material map. There is much to admire in Hewitt’s polemical and poetical defence of the ‘emotional, physical and imaginative’ power of the paper map (‘Turn Around When Possible’ 3). At the same time, however, there is a danger that the fetishising of paper maps can lead to a reactionary dismissal of the new imaginative geographies that have been opened up by geospatial technologies. There is a need, then, to counter such cartographic conservatism by exploring how the practices of contemporary creative writers have been shaped by the emergence of a suite of digital technologies. How, for instance, have contemporary poets represented geospatial technologies such as Google Earth in conventional literary texts? Is it possible to identify some examples of how writers have actually produced new digital maps as part of their own creative practices? By extension, in what ways have writers sought to harness the potential of digital technologies to think about the embodied materiality of what it means to be-in-the-world? This chapter addresses these questions by examining some key examples of how contemporary British writers – including Paul Farley, Charles Cumming and, most importantly, Rachel Lichtenstein – have either represented or used digital maps and mapping practices in poetic, fictional and non-fictional place writings. Moreover, this chapter is undergirded by the belief that the conceptual thinking and digital practices of critical literary map-makers will be enriched through an engagement with the self-reflexive and processual work of contemporary creative practitioners.
