Mapping Roberto Bolaño’s worlds, “literary” and “non-literary” alike, invites the work of many hands. In that collaborative spirit, conceived and organized in four parts – “Geographical, Social, and Historical Contexts,” “Shaping Events and Literary History,” “Genres, Discourses, Media,” and “Aesthetics, Culture, and Politics” – the twenty-nine essays that follow bring together the work of a distinguished group of scholars representing a range of disciplines. The volume itself is thus a nexus of many overlapping worlds, of locations and perspectives aligned and divergent, a site to encourage conversations about Bolaño’s work for generations to come, to 2666 and beyond.

Chapter 4 examines how the aftosa commission understood and countered opposition, using threats and targeted violence, carefully calibrated concessions, propaganda, mediation by regional bosses and powerbrokers, and information-gathering. It argues that this blend of tactics illustrates the Mexican state’s conceptions of order and security, and supports the notion of the PRI regime as a "dictablanda"- authoritarian but institutionally weak, and reliant on a complicated blend of repressive and consensual mechanisms.

This chapter examines the tensions inherent in how languages and identities are mapped geographically and cognitively, and the particular issues which multilingualism brings out in this mapping. Linguistic atlases require clear boundaries to be drawn within messy realities – a utopian undertaking with significant uses, which, on balance, may or may not outweigh the risks of declaring this or that language as belonging to, or dominant in, this or that place. There has in addition been a strong tendency to represent the cognitive dimensions of multilingualism and identity using the same mapping techniques developed in geographical representation, both with fMRI research and in recent work based on a crossing from geographical to cognitive (including emotional) representation, as multilingual children are asked to divide up and colour in an outline figure representing which of their languages represents which part of their personal identity. The aims of this chapter are to probe the ways in which multilingualism and identity are conceived and mapped, to establish the limits of their representation, and to enrich understanding of the linguistic phenomena which they are designed to capture.

Frederick Douglass was perhaps the most successful African American abolitionist to traverse the Atlantic and tour the British Isles. In town halls, churches, taverns, and private parlor rooms across the country he spoke to hundreds of thousands of people, sparking a wave of transatlantic abolition that had a deep impact on the British landscape. While he only traveled to Britain and Ireland three times, the friendships and networks he created, together with his transformative experiences there, shaped, supported and sustained his public antislavery work in the United States for the rest of his life.

Vowels are said to be less distinctive in prenasal context. The “pin/pen” merger in the Southern United States is a good example. This study attempts to investigate the effects of the postvocalic nasal on the identification and discrimination of American English vowels by native speakers of American English (NE) and Japanese (NJ). These two groups of participants identified six American English (AE) monophthongs /i, ɪ, ɛ, æ, ɑ, ʌ/ and discriminated six vowel pairs /i/-/ɪ/, /ɛ/-/ɪ/, /æ/-/ɛ/, /æ/-/ɑ/, /æ/-/ʌ /, and /ɑ/-/ʌ / in prenasal context. NJ also identified these American English vowels in terms of Japanese vowel categories. The results revealed that, overall, NE outperformed NJ in both identification and discrimination. In addition, how AE vowels were perceptually mapped to Japanese vowels predicted NJ’s discrimination. However, both groups’ performances were found to be poorer in the prenasal context when compared to their previous performances in the preplosive context (Nozawa & Wayland 2012), and NJ were more adversely (but differently) affected by nasalization than NE.

This study investigates the perceptual accuracy of eight English obstruents in the onset and coda position by Mandarin and Korean-speaking L2 learners and by a control group of native English speakers. According to the current theoretical models on second language speech learning, L1 Mandarin and Korean speakers are expected to differ in their perception of English obstruents due to the different correspondence between their respective L1 obstruents and those in English. On the other hand, theories based on intrinsic differences in the difficulty of different linguistic skills imply that some L2 sounds would be more difficult than others regardless of the L1 background. The results showed that all three groups were significantly more accurate in perceiving obstruents in the onset than in the coda position, voiceless than voiced targets, stops than fricatives, and labials than coronals. /θ/ and /ð/ were particularly poorly identified. The two learner groups were equally accurate in the onset position, but the Mandarin group outperformed the Korean group in the coda position. Regarding the specific obstruents, some patterns were predicted by mapping to the L1. Nonetheless, the general similarity between the two groups suggests a robust and pervasive language-independent tendency in speech perception.

In “Digital Hemingway,” Laura Godfrey offers an in-depth overview of Hemingway’s growing presence on the Internet since 2000. At the start of the new millenium, website technology and in particular interactive maps were relatively primitive. Hemingway fans/followers such as Michael Palin – the former Monty Python comedian whose late-1990s BBC series Hemingway Adventure popularized Hemingway tourism – employed only basic interactive technologies, relying on more analog experiences. Soon, however, advances in programming allowed for modes of mapping and spatial assessment that broadened the way readers could visualize place in Hemingway. With the introduction of e-books c. 2004, the experience of the Hemingway “book” also transformed – so too with access to images of Hemingway online and of clips on YouTube, in particular his playfully weird acceptance of the Nobel Prize in 1954. Godfrey also examines Hemingway’s place among the ever-proliferating memes that online users create and circulate. She also discusses the roles he plays in various forms of online gaming. All of these technologies have transformed the relationship between the reader and Hemingway’s writing.

Chapters 4, 5, and 6 deal with the first thirty years of colonial rule in the region. Chapter 4 discusses how knowledge on the region was gained by agents of the colonial administration, scientists, and travellers. The media for storing knowledge were lengthy travel reports, photography, and maps. North-western Namibia is construed as a frontier region in which wildlife and 'primitive tribes' have survived. The chapter discusses in detail how knowledge gained and enshrined in expeditions is laid down in different media.

The Introduction affirms the need for a fresh approach to literary mapping centred upon the relationship between map and text as a performative one, brought to life through the actions of the reader. It situates the study in relation to other recent approaches and growing interest in literary and fictional maps. It considers the role and function of a map in a literary work and offers some initial definitions of literary map types. The introduction also outlines the structure of the book and the method in terms of three main sections. The first two chapters establish the conceptual nature of the project, by articulating a critical cartographic approach and then by historicising early examples of fictional maps and explaining the full explosion of the form in the mid-late nineteenth century. Four core chapters then consider maps in relation to newly emerging genres: the adventure story and spy novel; detective fiction; children’s literature; fantasy. The final two chapters of the book turn to the reader. They explore both the absence of maps in the realist novel, in relation to arguments around representation, and the existence, shape and form of the cognitive literary map within the mind. (196)

The chapter begins with an exploration of the geo-physical environment that shaped Jingdezhen’s past, followed by a discussion of Jingdezhen’s place within the administrative structures of the Ming empire. From Jingdezhen’s place in the administrative organization of the empire, the regional environment, and the kiln locations that make up the Jingdezhen kiln site complex, the chapter moves to the spatial lay-out and organization of the imperial kilns within that complex, and ends with the space of a single workshop within the imperial kiln. The mountains and rivers, the offices of the county administration, the office buildings of the imperial kiln, and the numerous workspaces all coexisted in this sixteenth-century moment. These features were not located in physically different spaces, but assert their own order over the space, thereby representing different visions of the space. The workers in each workshop were dependent on the production processes in the other workshops, and overall, their work formed part of the way in which the imperial state organised its procurement of porcelain. The imperial kiln formed one small part of the administration of the whole empire.