Customer Reviews

The Atlas of Literature

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Hogwart's School? It's in England somewhere. Is it real or imagined?
Jefferson, Mississippi, in Yoknapatawpha County. That one is real, right?

Place names in literature. Some are so real as to defy the reality of their imagined creation. J.K. Rowling and William Faulkner set stories in time and places that are now mythic in purport. George Orwell simply chose real places to turn his anti-fascist sensibilities. There is nothing the least bit imagined about Aleksandr Solzenhitsyn's gulag prisons.

Finding these places, real and imagined, on the map makes "The Atlas of Literature" a welcome addition to one's personal library. Editor Malcolm Bradbury worked four years with contributers in putting together this geographical history of literature beginning with the medieval period and concluding with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 when the world once again changed dramatically.

I arbitrarily selected one writer to demonstrate what this atlas does. The chapter is called "James Fenimore Cooper's Frontier." One map depicts the "Acquisition of Indian Territory" and "Expansion of European Settlement," two topics that dominated Cooper's writing. One set of novels was concerned with Leatherstocking, who represented this western movement. Another map shows the settings of the five novels in the saga. Two paintings by N.C. Wyeth highlight two of the books. A painting by Romantic nature painter Thomas Cole depicts the "romantic vision of the dying wilderness...as the march of civilization prospered" (85).

I turn from chapter to chapter trying to settle on one more section and think, How do I choose? It is ALL fascinating. I am looking at locations which influenced writers, locations writers influenced, places where they gathered to talk of life and love and their work--Paris, London, Harlem, Jerusalem. So I choose a place that readers may be least familiar with and invite them to taste the riches of the literature of this region, this place, this map.

It is Nigeria. Chinua Achebe in "Things Fall Apart" writes of a changing Africa from tribalism to colonialism in early twentieth century. The first African to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, Wole Soyinka is renowned for his memoir, "Ake: The Years of Childhood." A younger Nigerian, Ben Okri, now an English citizen, won the Booker prize for "The Famished Road," a legend-based fantasy set in Nigeria. The maps and insets, photographs of the writers, covers of books, scenes from locales--all combine to provide a history of these places in literature.

Contemporary Israeli writing, Andalusia's Arabic literature, the Canadian scene, Australia's literary map, a chapter on Broadway of the 1950's and 1960's (by the way, that is young Arthur Miller looking from behind Virginia Woolf on the cover of the Atlas), Post-war Italian fiction, German fiction, Existential Paris, the Spanish Civil War, Mark Twain's Mississippi, Oxford and Cambridge, Dante's Italy. I think you can see how diverse the content is.

I would be remiss not to specifically mention South America and the Magic-Realists. But on the way, I pass Russia, India, Japan, Ireland, the Caribbean, ah, here we are: Latin America--a literary world all its own, rich in the writings of Octavio Paz, Alejo Carpentier, Gabriel Garcia Marquez (a must-read writer!!), Mario Vargas Llosa, Carlos Fuentes, Gabriela Mistral, Isabel Allende, and Julio Cortazar.

If for nothing else, this Atlas can certainly guide your world-wide reading, if you accept this mission. Select a chapter any place in the world, perhaps a locale you know nothing of, find a writer, find a book, and begin a new journey. Let the maps, the atlas, be the guide to your destination: a new world of reading.

I found this book to be a wonderful addition to my library. It is truly a feast for lovers of literature. I have only one dissenting comment. Why the omission of Gore Vidal? With the inclusion of Norman Mailer, surely this omission is an oversight and not calculated. Overall, though, a marvelous book.

An A to Z comprehensive guide through the long road of Literature.Almost everything about books and authors were covered in this atlas. From Austen to Zweig.Categorized into various notable sections.Namely,The Middle Ages and The Renaissance, The Age of Reason, The Romantics,The Age of Industrialism and Empire, The Age of Realism, The Modern World,After the 2nd World War and the World Today. Each part were comprehensively arranged and illustrated with famous examples and represented by the authors from that era. It covered almost all the important events and people in Literature. I enjoyed this atlas because each part was unique yet vitally contributed to the whole. It's handy to get all these Literary information compressed into a single book. It also gave a brief biographies of authors and showed their birthplace and journeys through their life and their famous works and contributions to the society. Well-done with great pictures and informative maps,notes,facts and figures. It showed the trends of Literary world and how it shaped our lives and affected our thoughts.

If you love reading all the classics and wish to learn more about their importance within modern history, or want to view the other side of the spectrum and see how the progress of western culture influenced the greatest writers through the ages, this volume should be included in your personal library.

I know this introduction sounds as if I were lauding some ponderous academic tome that would bore any casual reader to death, but do not be fooled, this book is actually a pleasant surprise and readable from cover to cover.

First, it is filled with concise chapters or sections that do not take long to read, each section focusing on an important period of history, beginning with the Middle Ages / Renaissance and ending with culture and the world after the fall of the Berlin wall. Famous authors and their history-making masterpieces of literature are discussed in each chapter, some authors, cities, countries and geographical areas receive special attention for certain centuries or epochs, like the sections entitled "Cervante's Spain", "Washington Irving's Europe" or "London in the 1890s". It is quite useful if you have just bought a copy of Gulliver's Travels or Wurthering Heights, to cite a few examples, and want to understand their general background, the authors who wrote them, the cultural history of the times, and how these works may have influenced the creativity of other writers.

Second, this book is filled with interesting maps and graphs, not only pictures charting historical events, but special illustrations marking out sites in various cities where a famous scene in a novel occurred, plus charts plotting the travels of fictional characters. Plans of cities showing where authors loved to `hang out' and discuss their ideas are also included, places that may still be found today or that no longer exist are clearly marked. There are also numerous illustrations, sketches and artworks that help evoke a `feeling' of each period, such as paintings, artworks, photographs, book covers and illustrations not to mention authors' portraits. The reader will find that this work really is an "Atlas of Literature", my only complaint--it's a shame that the publisher did not delve deeper and include chapters on ancient civilizations and their literary culture, like the epics and dramas of ancient Greece and Rome. How could the Illiad by Homer and the Aeneid by Virgil not be included in this book? These great classics influenced more writers than can be imagined. The contributors certainly missed out on the charts they could have included of ancient Troy plus the wanderings of Ulysses and Aeneas. Never mind, the book is still enjoyable, so I'm giving it the full five stars.

Last but not least, there is an informative appendix with an alphabetical listing of authors and their works, more lists featuring interesting international places to visit that are associated with the literary world such as museums dedicated to specific writers, book clubs, homes of famous authors, also cemeteries where they are buried to name few sites. There is also a suggested list of books for further research, and a useful index for quick referencing if you do not feel like reading this volume straight from beginning to end. This "atlas" is a treasure for literature lovers.

This is a magnificently produced, oversized volume, lavish with maps, pictures, and more than eighty essays by well-credentialed scholars, highly worth reading by anyone interested in knowing "where" events described in fiction occurred in the real world, as well as where various authors lived, wrote, and died. It also portrays well the changing cultures in and about which they wrote--this is all very helpful to the general reader who would otherwise need to comb an encyclopedia (or Wikipedia!) for much of this information, and even then would probably not be able to put together such coherent descriptions.

Its very success at what it does accomplish, however, makes its failures all the more disappointing. Edicotr Malcolm Bradbury chose to begin with Dante rather than Homer, ignoring not only the literature of Greece and Rome, but also Anglo-Saxon (e.g., Beowulf, Pearl, Gawaine & the Green Knight) and Middle French (Chretien de Troyes) and English literature (apart from Chaucer). Also noticeable by their absence are some of the most popular writers of the 20th century (e.g., C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien), as well as a number of "major minor" authors such as Christina Rossetti, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Hilaire Belloc, Flannery O'Connor (mentioned once), to mention only a few. These choices would be more understandable if its survey began with Homer; it is far less so given that two-thirds of the book is given to the past 140 years (since Dickens and Twain).

It is fairly Anglo-centric, occasionally mentioning European writers (e.g., Ibsen), but ignoring many considered "important" or "major" national writers (e.g., Sigrid Undset, Nobel Prize for Literature, 1928), as well as Asian, Arabic, Arican, and South American writers (Salman Rushdie is a major exception).

Like many historical surveys, it becomes increasingly detailed as its timeline approaches the present, which increases the probability that it discusses works (and their authors) are less likely to endure, since their endurability has not yet been tested.

All of these choices might be excused if the editor used his "Introduction" to explain his decisions to (1) begin with Dante; (2) focus on the last century or so, or (at least) the basis for his choices of authors and topics.

If your interest is in the twentieth century in Anglo-American literature, this may be helpful. If you are looking for a work that will help you follow Ulysses or Aeneas, or Xenophon or Caesar, or if you are interested in explicitly religious (i.e., Christian) or authors and literature from outside the western European tradition, this will only disappoint.