Christina Ljungberg offers a grand tour of mental spaces created by literary narratives. She explores the signs of real and imaginary territories as well as classical and contemporary depictions of rural, urban, and maritime realms. Ljungberg examines the devices of cartographic writing and discovers mappings and re-mappings in writings from Thomas More to postcolonial novelists. The analytic panorama resulting from her investigations give ample support to her main thesis, namely that imaginary spaces are mental diagrams.

- Winfried Nöth, PUC São Paulo,

This fresh investigation of maps in fictional works makes clear how high-canon literature is multimodal, just as basic human communication is. Ljungberg clarifies the cognitive operations we use to make sense of verbal and visual diagrams in literature and culture. The result is a penetrating and insightful study at the intersection of cognitive science and the arts.

- Mark Turner, Case Western University,

Too often, theory hangs in the air, swinging at a distance from any entanglement with concrete matters, while no less frequently singular texts and their historical settings are left unduly opaque because insufficiently theorized. In contrast, this book illuminates photography (light writing) and contextualizes cartography (‘map writing’) in an arresting manner. Christina Ljungberg stops readers in their tracks, forcing them to think anew about familiar topics and to consider carefully what is typically overlooked. But this book is itself a map of a complex terrain, hence a means by which we can orient ourselves to nothing less than the world of texts, maps, and photographs. It facilitates exploration, at every turn inviting us to take a path we would likely have missed but for the author's intimate familiarity with a vast landscape and, of equal relevance, her deft skill at cultural cartography.

- Vincent M. Colapietro, The Pennsylvania State University,