Cartographical Flights: Mapping Strategies in Steven Heighton's Novels #348798

In The Shadow Boxer (2000), Afterlands (2005) and Every Lost Country (2010) Steven Heighton, the award-winning Canadian writer and poet (2010 National Magazine Awards gold medal for fiction, 2010 K.M. Hunter Award for literature, 2016 Governor General’s Award for Poetry) accompanies each novel with a handwritten map which locates the narrative in specific geographical areas. This study, ranging across disciplines and theories, explores the various ways and forms through which Heighton’s novels combine spatial and narrative practices, thus demonstrating that maps are much more than mere instruments of measurement and representation. Through the chapters the geocritical approach also extends beyond the text and the map, and reaches the realm of the visual image overlapping with subjective and manipulated representations of the real.