LITERARY CARTOGRAPHY: MAP AS A PARATEXTUAL ELEMENT IN BRITISH CHILDREN’S LITERATURE
DOI: 10.23951/2312-7899-2021-2-28-42
Since one of the first representations of the Earth in “The Map Psalter”, marine maps from the Age of Discovery and the first literary atlases, maps have held a special place in British culture. Since the map of the Treasure Island, which is considered to be a pioneer of the kind, from Robert Louis Stevenson’s novel of the same name, maps have always played a significant role in British children’s literature. A literary map, especially a map in children’s books, is an important paratextual element. Although the roles and functions of maps may vary greatly, the place of a map (most frequently it is an endpaper or a frontispiece) makes literary cartography the first visual element for the reader, which enables a map to set the setting, genre, and particular audience expectations. The fact that it is not an obligatory element of a book makes the presence of a map in a book an essential part of the author’s artistic vision and a key (para)textual element of the book. The five maps from the classic books written for younger readers between 1883 and 1926 may prove that maps perform multiple functions and play a greater role than that of beautiful drawings on frontispieces. The maps are the 17th-century marine map of the imaginary island from Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island; the actual map of India from Rudyard Kipling’s Kim; the map of Kensington Gardens presumably drawn by a child from James M. Barrie’s Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens; the map of the Thames Valley inhibited by anthropomorphic animals from Kenneth Graham’s The Wind in the Willows. The analysis of these maps’ paratextual powers and textual-visual interactions leads to the conclusion that the five literary maps from the classic children’s books of the Golden Age period reveal the five potential ways of interaction between the textual and the visual: map as a plot device, map as a document, map as a narrator, map as the transcendent, and map as memory, correspondingly. The conclusion poses the following questions: What happens to maps during the act of translation from English into Russian or any other language? Is it possible to translate cartography? How crucial is the omission of a map? The answers to these questions are yet to be discovered.
Keywords: literary map, paratext, illustration, children’s literature, visual culture, translation
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Issue: 2, 2021
Series of issue: Issue 2
Rubric: ARTICLES
Pages: 28 — 42
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