"The performative map: cartography as a mode of narrative discourse in eighteenth century fictional texts"

In my paper, I wish to explore the connections between mapping and writing focusing especially on Moll Flanders and what mapping that work (for MappingWriting) has revealed about Defoe's sense of maps and of space. What the endeavour amounts to is a reflection on the relationship between geography and literature, and more particularly the evolution of narrative forms in the eighteenth-century around the concepts of space and geography. It is the concept of modernity that seems to be at stake here. To what extent does cartography participate to the construction of modernity in new narrative forms such as the novel? Is the new literary production in eighteenth-century Britain a new way of thinking space? What makes a map and what does a map do, i.e. does it have a performative dimension? Can we say that authors like Defoe contributed to geography and conversely that geography and cartography, as disciplines and as languages, contributed to the literary and novelistic discourse in the eighteenth century