ABSTRACT
Identities are mapped in real and imaginary, material and metaphorical spaces. Moving fromRobinson Crusoe, a broad map of nineteenth-century Britain and empire, towards a more focused exploration of mapping, I turn to explore the mapping of identity in adventure literature. Maps naturalise and normalise, fixing constructions of identity and geography. And since they are often asso ciated with conservative reinscriptions of thestatus quo, with enclosing and circumscribing geographies and identities, maps tend to fix dominant ways of seeing geography and hegemonic constructions of identity. Hegemonic constructions of race, gender, class and other dimensions of identity reflect the characteristics of the spaces in which they are mapped. In other words, the nature of the spaces - real and imaginative, material and metaphorical - make a difference to the nature of the hegemonic identities.
