Introduction

As is well known, the founders of narratology – Barthes, Bremond, Genette, Greimas, Todorov – privileged time over space in their narrative models. Indeed, with the possible exception of Greimas and because they were particularly interested in distinctive narrative traits and elements, they paid little attention to spatial relations in narrative. After all, any narrative represents a series of asynchronous events and points to temporal transformations of states, temporal links between them, and temporal connections between the narrating and the narrated, the representing and the represented. On the other hand, even though events in narrative take place, they are often represented without any reference to their spatial aspects or positions. Nevertheless, an early narratologist like Philippe Hamon (1981) did pay considerable attention to description and to narrative settings; and Seymour Chatman (1978) pointed to differences between story space and discourse space.^[1] Moreover, a number of scholars from other traditions and with other concerns underscored the importance of space in narrative. Mikhail Bakhtin (1981), for instance, famously stressed time-space interdependence and Jurij Lotman (1977) highlighted the symbolic dimension of spatial configurations as well as the links between plot progression and movement across spaces. Exploiting these various insights, Gabriel Zoran (1984) proffered a substantial model of narrative structuration of space. It was the first of ever more numerous studies – by possible world narratological theorists, cognitive narratologists, students of narrative in various media, and, most recently, researchers edifying bridges between geography and narratology – not only of space in narrative but also of narrative in space (Buchholz & Jahn 2005; Herman 2002; Ryan 1991, 2003, 2014; Ryan, Foote & Azaryahu 2016).

This issue constitutes a further consideration of these topics and it features a diverse set of illustrations of geographical narratology. After discussing various attempts by classical and postclassical narratology to focus on space, Joshua Parker underlines the importance for the discipline of employing the many resources of geography to further study spatial characteristics and he emphasizes that narrative is about going from point a to point b as well as going from time a to time b. Assessing the potential of geographical narratology and drawing on texts by Raymond Carver and Lydia Davis, Nancy Easterlin insists on the importance of a human-oriented geography and of “space as” or “space for” rather than “space in itself.” She argues for a broadly interdisciplinary approach that takes into account the mutual dependence of human beings and the (physical) environment. Matti Hyvärinen, invoking Jerome Bruner’s discussion of narrative, canonicity, and breach as well as Reinhart Koselleck’s investigation of the expectation-experience existential pair, contends that geographical places incarnate characters’ emotions and he focuses on Ian McEwan’s The Children Act to show how a geographical approach enhances socionarratological perspectives. Mounting a spirited defense of the notion of (story)worlds and relying on examples from Proust to Tolkien, Marie-Laure Ryan – a pioneer of geographical narratology – examines the strategies of readers who create maps of these worlds and demonstrates that mapping is a fruitful kind of engagement with narratives, one that enhances the “cartographic” reader’s understanding and enjoyment. Laura Buchholz sheds significant light on the role of geography in narrative by studying the strategies, methods, and processes that viewers of Lost, the television show, deploy in reconstructing together, through the Lostpedia wiki, the fictional island where the main action takes place. Philippe Carrard utilizes maps referring to the German invasion of the USSR in June 1941 to establish that maps can have a narrative dimension and can be analyzed in terms of such narratological categories as order, duration, or frequency. George Prokhorov and Sergey Saveliev show how, in connecting physical geography and human experiences, early modern travel narratives turn a mysterious, unknown Russia into a charted space for trade and an established place on the road to Cathay. Considering what he calls innerscapes, artefactual depictions of the mind as world, Marco Bernini uses examples from a short story (Kafka’s “The Bridge”), a radio play (Beckett’s Embers), and a documentary (Adam + 1, a film about a voice hearer’s experience) to indicate how such artefactual renderings can increase our understanding of inner worlds, inner realities, and dreamscapes. Brian McAllister blends Gabriel Zorans model of space in narrative into Henri Lefebvre’s work on the social creation of space and draws on Flann O’Brien’s At-Swim-Two-Birds and the various kinds of disorientation – topographic, chronotopic, linguistic, and even typographic – at work in it to describe how narrative is at the heart of spatial practice. Last but by no means least, exploiting insights from humanist geography to analyze description in passages from Willa Cather’s O Pioneers!, Paul Bowles’s The Sheltering Sky, and Paul Auster’s City of Glass, David Rodriguez underlines the role it plays in the form of the environment.

Together, the contributors to this issue imagine, illustrate, and develop many possibilities of geographical narratology. There are, of course, other possibilities, including, for example, the study of the relations between geographic areas or elements and particular narratological categories or features (e. g. variable or multiple internal focalization, first-person plural or second-person singular narration, intrusive or unintrusive narrators, extradiegetic or intradiegetic narratees). Geographical narratology is open for further exploration.