Marthe Cuvelier, ‘Mapping William Wilson by Edgar Allan Poe’

Marthe Cuvelier is a student at the University of Antwerp (Belgium), and is currently completing a semester abroad at Lancaster. After having obtained her bachelor’s degree in Linguistics and Literature, option English – Theatre, Film and Literature, she now continues her studies by doing a master’s degree in English Linguistics and Literature. For this mapping assignment I chose a short story called William Wilson, written by Edgar Allan Poe. It was published in 1839 and tells us a part of the life story of a man called William Wilson. We follow William Wilson from his primary school to his later …

Continue Reading

Autumn Barlow, ‘Three Men in a Boat, on a Map’

Autumn Barlow is completing an MA in English Literature at Lancaster University. Jerome K Jerome’s short story Three Men in A Boat was published in 1889. It was originally intended to be a travel guide, but it soon became a humorous account of three men trying to have a boating holiday up the Thames. As my maps reveal, though, it’s much more than that. What could have been a straightforward line meandering up a river and back again is exploded across the world, and ultimately this book demonstrates the global consciousness of the average late Victorian reader – as well …

Continue Reading

Mapping Pride and Prejudice

By Lex Elliott (MA Student, Lancaster University) This semester, the new English Literature MA module Nineteenth Century Literature: Place – Space – Text asked students to complete a digital map for their formative assessment. Their brief was to select a nineteenth-century text and to use a digital mapping tool such as Google MyMaps or CartoDB to create a map of an element of their chosen text. That map should raise questions about the ways that we conceive of or understand place/space in the text. For more information about this task, please get in touch with the module tutor, Joanna Taylor. Here, Lex …

Continue Reading

Reading and mapping Swallows and Amazons

On July 24 this year, the new film adaptation of Arthur Ransome’s children’s classic Swallows and Amazons (first published in 1930, and set in summer 1929) had its world premiere at the Theatre by the Lake in Keswick, one of the more frequently-visited towns in the Lake District National Park. The film, like the book on which it’s based, tells the story of the four Walker children – John, Susan, Titty (renamed Tatty in the film) and Roger – and their adventures on and around a Cumbrian lake. The film’s director, Philippa Lowthorpe, was drawn to the project because Ransome’s …

Continue Reading