ABSTRACT
Within literary studies, a distinction between the ‘cartographic’ and the ‘visual’ has frequently been acknowledged. Literary cartography, for instance, has been accused of dealing with abstract, distant spaces, whilst neglecting the analogic, close appreciation of places and landscapes (Cerreti). The writer has been alternately described as a painter (Cometa) and a cartographer (Turchi). The reader’s visual imagination has been treated as something different from his or her spatial cognition. Research on space and language and on authors’ and readers’ imaginative geographies have distinguished ‘survey knowledge’, or map-like descriptions, from ‘route knowledge’, or tour-like descriptions (Mondada; Ryan, ‘Cognitive Maps’), the former providing vertical projections and the latter providing embodied experience (Ryan, ‘Space’).
