The Processual Intertextuality of Literary Cartographies: Critical and Digital Practices

Drawing upon recent interdisciplinary research in the fields of literary geography and critical cartography, this article argues that a concept of processual intertextuality might be used to open up thinking about literary maps and mapping practices: a concept through which such maps are understood to be systems of cultural signification which are inextricably embedded within the material world and which are brought into being with each embodied reading or use. This theory is then applied to maps which are both reproduced within and generated by Arthur Ransome's Swallows and Amazons (1930): an adventure novel for children which is predicated upon a conflation of actual and imagined geographies. The article goes on to propose that the critical understanding of the processual intertextuality of literary cartographies might be further enhanced by the use of a suite of geo-location technologies; and, ultimately, it suggests that the future of critical literary cartography might be founded, at least in part, upon in-the-field digital mapping practices.