The Cambridge History of The Gothic, Volume II: Gothic in the Nineteenth Century, edited by Dale Townshend and Angela Wright

Abstract

of the setting (the official world of the adult) and a more imaginative world in which the children create and possess the territory on their own terms (164). This map connects the double perspective of the child’s reappropriation of space and the adult’s nostalgia for a place in memory. When she turns her discussion to Tolkien’s fiction, Bushell concentrates upon the author’s cartographic imagination that never serves as a background to the fiction but rather initiates the creative process. The maps enable and inhabit his fiction. Given the fear that a map might not be accurate, Bushell returns to nineteenthcentury fiction and wonders why authors such as Anthony Trollope and Thomas Hardy chose to use maps in their fiction. After a discussion of the positive value for them concerning the interconnection between maps and their novels, she distinguishes between the two by pointing out that Trollope’s sense of place and mapping depended upon his sensitivity to who owned what property in Barchester and Hardy’s upon the different kinds of topography in the landscape of Wessex. The last portion of this study leaves behind specific narratives and engages larger theoretical concepts, particularly the process of reading as a form of mapping and the phenomenon of respatializing the text by the reader. This exploration takes Bushell into the nature of the inner readerly map and the new kind of literary mapping offered by studies in neurology and her own work in digital literary cartography. Here is where I have some concern, for, as stodgy as it sounds, this form of mapping seems almost to contradict what Bushell admits at the end of her study about the mapping of Neverland in Peter Pan (1911), which is constantly in flux and moves “toward a collective map filled with imaginative generic elements of children’s play”—a figure “for childhood creativity and externalization of the inner cognitive map” (305). As correct as she may be, however, the question remains whether cognition and the imagination (no matter how neurologists attempt to find the source in the brain) can ever be mapped or targeted. Like the map itself, something always eludes such efforts, no matter how many layers of response one places on or combines with another. Something inevitably slips away and refuses to be collected, identified, or definitively marked. This is an ambitious, far-ranging, thorough, appropriately illustrated, and suggestive study of an interesting topic. The book is second in a series in which Bushell wants to “enlarge the boundaries of what we understand ‘the literary work’ to be” (15). Ann C. Colley SUNY Buffalo State University