Border Fictions

My reading this week included Simon Ryan's article "Inscribing the Emptiness" and Megan A. Norcia's "Puzzling Empire." I've also been editing an article about the spatiality of board games, so that Norcia's article (which I cite there!) felt particularly relevant. Because I work on children's culture, I'm especially interested in the link between education and play; how the carrying out of actions to (in the case of a jigsaw/dissected map) or on (in the case of many board games) a map for pleasure works to produce knowledge about the spaces depicted on that map.  I was not a Victorian child, but I did have a very large "world map" jigsaw puzzle when I was younger. In addition to teaching me some geography (it was the first place I encountered the international date line!) it also had large pictures of animals on the areas which they came from. (Ryan's article quotes a Jonathan Swift poem in which Swift makes fun of "Geograp...

In his introduction to Spatiality , Robert T. Tally Jr. suggests that literature works as a kind of mapping, "offering its readers descriptions of places, situating them in a kind of imaginary space, and providing points of reference by which they can orient themselves" (2). He goes on to point out that the opposite is also true, that "to draw a map is also to tell a story" (4). This week I'm thinking about how these two things, the story-as-map and the map-as-story play out in a series of detective novels that I've really enjoyed.    In a recent talk during a book launch (for Death Sets Sail , which I’ll discuss later) the author Robin Stevens described travelling to Egypt, the setting of the book, and taking copious notes on such matters as the exact  position of the sun at particular points in the day, in relation to a ship heading South on the Nile, as these could all affect the events of the plot. Stevens writes children’s murder mysteries, which are ...