19th-century
20th-century
A01=Anahit Behrooz
Author_Anahit Behrooz
cartography
Category=DSBH
Category=FM
Category=RGV
Category=RNA
Category=RNPG
climate change
Deep Time
ecocritical theory
ecocriticism
eq_bestseller
eq_biography-true-stories
eq_fantasy
eq_fiction
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
fantasy
Foucault
geology
J. R. R. Tolkien's legendarium
land
land conflict
literary geography
Lord of the Rings
maps
politics
postcolonial ecocriticism
postcolonial theory
Postcolonialism
power
temporality
The Silmarillion
Product details
- ISBN 9781350290808
- Dimensions: 156 x 234mm
- Publication Date: 22 Feb 2024
- Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Paperback
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In this cutting-edge study of Tolkien’s most critically neglected maps, Anahit Behrooz examines how cartography has traditionally been bound up in facilitating power.
Far more than just illustrations to aid understanding of the story, Tolkien’s corpus of maps are crucial to understanding the broader narratives between humans and their political and environmental landscapes within his legendarium. Undertaking a diegetic literary analysis of the maps as examples of Middle-earth’s own cultural output, Behrooz reveals a sub-created tradition of cartography that articulates specific power dynamics between mapmaker, map reader, and what is being mapped, as well as the human/nonhuman binary that represents human’s control over the natural world.
Mapping Middle-earth surveys how Tolkien frames cartography as an inherently political act that embodies a desire for control of that which it maps. In turn, it analyses harmful contemporary engagements with land that intersect with, but also move beyond, cartography such as environmental damage; human-induced geological change; and the natural and bodily costs of political violence and imperialism. Using historical, eco-critical, and postcolonial frameworks, and such theorists as Michel Foucault, Donna Haraway and Edward Said, this book explores Tolkien’s employment of particular generic tropes including medievalism, fantasy, and the interplay between image and text to highlight, and at times correct, his contemporary socio-political epoch and its destructive relationship with the wider world.
Anahit Behrooz is an independent research scholar and arts journalist. She received her PhD from the University of Edinburgh, UK, and has taught both at the University of Edinburgh and Edinburgh Napier University.
