Mapping Men and Empire: A Geography of Adventure.(Review)

Mapping Men and Empire: A Geography of Adventure, by Richard Phillips; pp. viii + 208. London and New York: Routledge, 1997, [pounds]45.00, [pounds]14.99 paper, $69.95, $18.95 paper.

"Sell Oedipal, buy pre-Oedipal," one prominent feminist literary critic irreverently recommended a few years ago. An updated version of this bit of advice regarding timing the academic market might well run: sell time, buy space. Or, more precisely, buy maps. For Richard Phillips's Mapping Men and Empire takes its place among a large and growing number of studies that turn from temporality to spatiality, from the language of the clock and the calendar to the language of the map in their treatment of British literature, British culture, and most particularly the British Empire. To name only a few: Edward Said proposes a geographical rather than temporal reading of the novel in Culture and Imperialism (1993); Anne …