Edinburgh Napier University

  Andrew Frayn opens our panel with “Mapping European War: Revolutionary Cartographies,” engaging with the possibilities and problems of recent theories of literary-critical cartography through the lens of British literature of World War I. The often-uncertain boundary between fact and fiction in war literature must be parsed to map effectively, and Frayn questions whether to map reduces the emotive impact of such texts, detracting from the rapid shifts between pleasure, pain, tension and release that characterize the narrative structure of novels about the conflict. Works about the War resist simplistic mappings of realist fiction onto realist geographies. This practice works for stories with lower stakes, but not when language and representation carry such emotional and political weight. Frayn concludes by testing the efficacy of non-realist cartographies.