The Literary Atlas as a “Revived” Historiographical Genre

Abstract

This article describes the “revived” genre of literary atlas not only as a means of heuristic documentation and instructive tourism but as a methodological impulse for modern research in the field of literary history. Its valuation is inspired by Literarni atlas Ljubljane [The Literary Atlas of Ljubljana] (2014), a Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts team publication authored by M. Dolgan (The Institute of Slovenian Literature); J. Fridl and M. Volk (Anton Melik Geographical Institute) which contains entries for 94 Slovenian writers and 11 maps documenting life and works of the profiled luminaries of Ljubljana from the Middle Ages to the present day. The textual and geographical sections of the Atlas being interconnected through graphical and numerical symbols enables the reader both diachronic and structural reference (i.e. study of historical periods and literary movements as well as geographical location, respectively). The Atlas presents the area of the Slovenian capital city as a specific manifestation of cultural memory, as an anthropological phenomenon researched within modern biographical studies and cultural history. In general, the Atlas, as a non-fiction genre of event historiography, creates an alternative literary history based on the personalisation and intellectualisation of literary values. The concept of the Slovenian Atlas corresponds with the paradigm of post-modern literary scholarship, methodologically linked with the “spatial turn”, as since the 1950s the classical temporal model of culture has been substituted with the spatial concept.