{"id":5415,"date":"2015-02-11T09:01:58","date_gmt":"2015-02-11T09:01:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/berghahnbooks.com\/blog\/?p=5415"},"modified":"2025-06-09T10:12:50","modified_gmt":"2025-06-09T10:12:50","slug":"using-mental-maps-to-locate-austen","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.berghahnbooks.com\/blog\/using-mental-maps-to-locate-austen","title":{"rendered":"Using Mental Maps to Locate Austen"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

The following is the second in a series of posts on Jane Austen. This is a\u00a0guest post written by James Brown, contributor to a\u00a0special issue<\/a>\u00a0of\u00a0Critical Survey<\/a><\/em>\u00a0which is devoted to the subject of\u00a0Jane Austen<\/a>. James Brown\u00a0is the author of the article titled\u00a0“Jane Austen’s Mental Maps.”<\/em><\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

The idea of\u00a0mental maps<\/a>\u00a0was planted in my mind when I was a research student in Oxford. It comes from geography, especially from Peter Gould and Rodney White\u2019s 1974 book,\u00a0Mental Maps<\/em><\/a>.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

I\u2019d also been an undergraduate at Oxford \u2013 one of\u00a0Terry Eagleton<\/a>\u2019s students. I followed up the ideas he threw out about all manner of topics besides English literature. But as a postgraduate, things were different. I was writing about seventeenth-century drama, and\u00a0Emrys Jones<\/a>\u00a0was my supervisor.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Emrys\u2019s interests were wide-ranging. In the faculty\u2019s list of research expertise, Emrys\u2019s entry was \u2018English literature 1500 to 1800\u2019, with some later topics thrown in for good measure. He was an expert on Byron, for example. Though there were no degrees in drama at Oxford, Emrys took an obvious delight and interest in theatre. He could look forbiddingly donnish (as he does in Al Pacino\u2019s\u00a0Looking For Richard<\/em><\/a>), but if he was talking about a performance he\u2019d liked, his delight was infectious. At one of our meetings we got onto the topic of farce, and Emrys thought of a show in which\u00a0Sheila Steafel<\/a>\u00a0had made an entrance that was side-splittingly funny because she was wearing sensible shoes. I can\u2019t remember exactly how or why the sensible shoes were funny, but I do remember Emrys, in his book-lined room in New College, succumbing to a fit of giggles, struggling to gasp out the words \u2018sensible shoes\u2019, and wiping away tears of laughter.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Emrys proposed all manner of connections between the drama I was researching and other literature and theatre. But, to me at any rate, he seldom suggested reading something from quite another discipline. So when he recommended Gould and White\u2019s\u00a0Mental Maps<\/em>\u00a0the title lodged in my mind. I thought of using it in my doctoral work as a way of understanding late seventeenth-century playgoers\u2019 perceptions of London. But in the end I didn\u2019t use it in my thesis. So the idea remained filed away at the back of my mind, waiting for its cue. The cue was just over twenty years coming. When I saw the call for papers for the\u00a0\u2018Locations of Austen\u2019 conference at Hatfield<\/a>\u00a0a couple of years ago, the phrase \u2018mental maps\u2019 popped back up.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

As it happens, the way I\u2019ve used the concept shows the influence of Terry Eagleton as well as of Emrys Jones. Though they were both Oxford professors of English, I suspect they felt they had little in common. Even though he\u2019d been at Oxford for 14 years when I met him, and would remain for another 18, Terry gave the impression he was just passing through, and he\u2019s since left. Emrys, on the other hand, seemed wedded to the place. Having been\u00a0C.S. Lewis<\/a>\u2019s student, in 1955 he had been chosen by Lewis as his successor at Magdalen, and he only left Magdalen in 1984 to take up the Goldsmiths\u2019 Chair at New College a quarter of a mile away, just the other side of Longwall Street. Yet it dawned on me, as I revised\u00a0\u2018Jane Austen\u2019s Mental Maps\u2019<\/a>\u00a0for Penny Pritchard\u2019s\u00a0special issue<\/a>\u00a0of\u00a0Critical Survey<\/em><\/a>\u00a0on Austen, that I had finally succeeded in bringing the two of them together. Emrys had alerted me to the idea of mental maps. But the way I describe them in my essay as\u00a0performative \u2013<\/em>\u00a0as being about what one can do with them rather than simply reflecting false consciousness\u00a0\u2013<\/em>\u00a0goes back to what I learned about ideology from Terry. Having struggled as postgraduate to reconcile what I learned from each of them, there\u2019s a private satisfaction in finally bringing them together.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

___________________________________________________________________________<\/p>\n

James Brown is an associate research fellow in the Department of Politics at Birkbeck, and a lecturer in theatre at IES Abroad, having previously taught politics and sociology at Birkbeck and film and literature at Middlesex University.<\/p>\n

ACCESS JAMES BROWN’S ARTICLE HERE<\/a><\/h3>\n

GET A FREE SAMPLE ISSUE OF CRITICAL SURVEY HERE \u00a0<\/a><\/h3>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The following is the second in a series of posts on Jane Austen. This is a\u00a0guest post written by James Brown, contributor to a\u00a0special issue\u00a0of\u00a0Critical Survey\u00a0which is devoted to the subject of\u00a0Jane Austen. James Brown\u00a0is the author of the article titled\u00a0“Jane Austen’s Mental Maps.”   The idea of\u00a0mental maps\u00a0was planted in my mind when I… Read More<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":19,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1,222],"tags":[1665,409,160,177,411,407,601,375],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.berghahnbooks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5415"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.berghahnbooks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.berghahnbooks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.berghahnbooks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/19"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.berghahnbooks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5415"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.berghahnbooks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5415\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5417,"href":"https:\/\/www.berghahnbooks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5415\/revisions\/5417"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.berghahnbooks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5415"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.berghahnbooks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5415"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.berghahnbooks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5415"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}