Literary maps: Cartography in Anglo-Irish literature

My dissertation proposes maps as key to navigating the landscape of Anglo-Irish literature. The Anglo-Irish Revival of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century depended on the maps produced by the Ordnance Survey of the British army between 1824 and 1841 for much of its raw material. This material came from the extensive investigations in history, archaeology, and folklore carried out by the employees of the survey, as well as from the maps themselves. I argue that the survey's historical and cartographic contributions are central to the work of Irish writers from the apocryphal translator James Clarence Mangan to J.M. Synge, and W.B. Yeats. "Literary Maps" reinserts these authors' works into their contemporary cultural and disciplinary context---the development of a significant and effective tool of British government in Ireland---and argues for the centrality of mapping to their understanding of history.;I also make an intervention into the study of colonial mapmaking, reading the maps and associated publications of cartographers from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries. I argue that the history of cartography in Ireland undermines our understanding of maps of colonized spaces as a seamless language of power; while maps promise to encode and consolidate power, they also facilitate the unbinding of that power. Though the process of map-making offers new imaginative possibilities for Irish literature in English, the traffic is by no means one way, and my dissertation hinges on the symbiotic relationship between describing Ireland in maps and describing it in imaginative literature. Mangan, Synge, and Yeats all offer compelling alternative visions of landscape, history, and folklore that constantly interrupt the appearance of order so carefully constructed in maps, exposing and exploiting the fissures that I identify in my reading of the work of the Ordnance Survey. In addition, these writers look to maps to provide an imaginative idea of landscape that overcomes the narrow, sectarian divisions of the nationalist movement, and proposes an inclusive, cosmopolitan vision of the state. "Literary Maps" attempts to recuperate the shared history of mapmaking and literature in Ireland.