Chronotopic Cartography: Mapping Literary Time-Space

This short methods paper emerges out of the AHRC-funded ‘Chronotopic Cartographies’ project for the digital mapping of place and space as represented in works of literature. The primary aim of that project was to find a way of mapping and visualizing represented literary worlds for which there is no corresponding real ‘ground’. A solution was found in the form of topological graphs which allow for relative rather than absolute mapping (but also permit a relative imaginary map to be lain on top of a pre-existing cartesian form). Using a spatial schema to chunk out the text in terms of chronotopic (time-space) zones enables the generation of a series of visualizations that show different kinds of spatio-temporal constructions in texts. The visualizations are centred upon nodes that consist of chronotopes (e.g. ‘the road’) as well as locations (e.g. ‘road to Geneva’); connections between them of different kinds and toporefs within them (references to other places from this one). The paper will articulate core methods from the project, outlining the stages involved in the process, from marking up the text, using a custom-made schema, through graph generation and into the implications for analysis. This will be illustrated in relation to two Victorian texts: the realist space of Dickens’s Oliver Twist; and the abstract poetic space of Browning’s ‘Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came’.

Consuming communities: the neighbourhood unit and the role of retail spaces on British housing estates, 1944–1958

ABSTRACTThis article challenges perceptions about the origins and objectives of the ‘neighbourhood unit principle’ that emerged in 1944, by focusing on the location and purpose of shops. It argues that the positioning of retail spaces was central, but largely overlooked, to the socio-spatial schema that lay at the heart of the neighbourhood principle. Planners saw shops as a hub of face-to-face interaction, through which nebulous objectives like ‘community spirit’ might be engendered. However, planners did not account for the way that their need-based model of shopping might be undermined by the consumer habits of inhabitants and the changing objectives of retailers.

Gender-based genre conventions and the critical reception of Buchi Emecheta’s Destination Biafra (Nigeria)

A gendered spatial schema of war – which creates a dichotomy between a masculine battlefront and a feminine home-front – undermines the credibility of women’s participation in battle, impacting on the legitimacy of women’s war novels. Through a study of Buchi Emecheta’s Destination Biafra, first published in 1982, this article highlights the role of genre conventions in the production and reception of war novels written by African women. Emecheta makes a daring choice to reconceptualise the home and/or battlefront dichotomy. By manipulating the representational genre convention of soldier-hero she subverts its archetypal masculinity. Debbie, the female soldier-hero, is the focal point of this analysis. Within the context of post-colonial African literature, women’s writing is portrayed as a process of ‘writing back’ to a canon that represents women as apolitical conduits of tradition. In Debbie, Emecheta foregoes canonical markers of African ‘authenticity’ to create a liminal figure that negotiates her identity between modernity and tradition; masculinity and femininity. The article concludes that the principal reason why the characterisation of Debbie is deemed dissatisfying is that it defies the facile categorisation offered by the adherence to the gendered representational conventions. Too often genre is considered a fixed category yet a meaningful analysis of Destination Biafra forces one to consider it as an open category whose conventions can be ‘bent’ to accommodate minority literatures spawning new sub-genres.