Geovisuality: Literary Implications

At a time when computing and mapping have become equally pervasive and ubiquitous, geovisual experiences have developed into familiar cultural and spatial practices. In light of this recent ‘geovisual turn’, the need to investigate how ‘geovisuality’ affects literary creativity as well as the analysis and reception of literary works emerges. This chapter aims to explore the possible literary implications of a specific focus on geovisuality from the point of view of a geographer interested in the relationship between cartography and literature, asking some questions and suggesting some paths for further research, without any ambition to systematise this area of interest. Thus, this essay is a theoretical piece that aims to sketch out some trends in contemporary visual/spatial culture, comparing them with the realm of literature. Although the geovisuality-literature connection has been crucial to the recent development of so-called ‘spatial humanities’, with the related advancement of refined qualitative geo-spatial technologies to meet humanist approaches, I contend that the geovisuality-literature connection can be explored in additional ways. These include the use of lay geovisual tools, such as virtual globes or cartographic apps, in both expert and non-expert experiences of reading literary works, the impact of a ‘geovisual culture’ on the imagination of the writer, the revival of pictorial literary maps, the representation of digital as well as pre-digital geovisual technologies and practices within the literary text, and the adoption of a geovisual frame of reference and lexicon in the interpretation of literature. Whether we consider the geo/cartographic realm or the literary one, however, embracing a geovisual perspective requires us to challenge some traditional binaries which revolve around the map/view opposition as well as the space/place opposition. The following sections elaborate on this challenge. The subsequent section concentrates on the geovisual implementation of geographic information systems (GIS)-based digital humanities, while the final section aims to open up additional paths towards a multifaceted appreciation of the geovisuality-literature connection.