Reading and Mapping Fiction: Spatialising the Literary Text by Sally Bushell (review)

hydrography; the “immediate call” for his maps came from a colonial historiographer, Robert Orme (72). Lambton’s geographical and military careers were inextricable; it is said that he saved General Baird’s army from disaster, using the position of the stars to guide them away from Tipu Sultan’s camp. D’Oyly was an amateur, rather than professional, artist. East India Company affairs were not enough to keep him busy: he even dabbled in satirical poetry, with Tom Raw, the Griffin appearing in 1828. Others remain in the shadows. In a discussion of the influence of Indian styles and techniques on colonial art, we hear that “D’Oyly employed a Patna artist Jairam Das, trained in the Mughal tradition, who was entrusted with his lithographic press” (149); Alicia and Anne Eliza Scott were two women artists inspired by the Himalayas; Fanny Parks published her account of the mountains in 1850. It may have been rewarding to pause in these places. The book is knowledgeable across multiple disciplines. Its key suggestion—that these modes of representing place ultimately perform the same work—can come at the expense of some subtlety. The distinctions among paintings, maps, and texts—or between bishops and botanists—could be addressed in more depth. This is one consequence of the book’s ambitious scope; like a map, it covers a great deal of ground. While it is interesting to be reminded of the historical arc of these ideas, references to Ptolemy, Bernard Mandeville, or the Tudors do not seem relevant to the project; they leave less space to interrogate assumptions about “Enlightenment order” or to chart granular shifts across the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (37). The survey of Romantic tourism in the Lake District will be familiar to readers. Writers as different as Charles Darwin and Richard Francis Burton can feel conflated. With such a variety of reference points, it is not always easy to locate where the book is placing its emphasis. It also establishes a dialogue with Michel Foucault, Michel de Certeau, and Henri Lefebvre. This might encourage further reflections on the spatial turn in the humanities: to what extent must such theories adapt in order to illuminate the histories of the Global South? (They were, after all, formed in contexts of their own: Lefebvre’s thinking engages both decolonization and globalization in the twentieth century.) Mukherjee does not ask this question. Nevertheless, her wide-ranging, thoughtful book makes a clear case for the importance of place to our understanding of the past. Ushashi Dasgupta Pembroke College, University of Oxford