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In:The Stylistics of Landscapes, the Landscapes of Stylistics
Edited by John Douthwaite, Daniela Francesca Virdis and Elisabetta Zurru
[Linguistic Approaches to Literature 28] 2017
► pp. 45–60

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Chapter 4
Immersed in imagined landscapes

Contextual frames and metalepsis in representing virtual travel in Elspeth Davie’s “A map of the world”

Published online: 7 December 2017
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https://doi.org/10.1075/lal.28.04emm
Abstract
Elspeth Davie’s short story “A map of the world” provides examples of a character apparently crossing narrative borders, termed “metalepsis” (Genette 1980, 1988). The character is unable to travel in actuality due to caring for her bed-ridden mother, but her imagination allows for virtual travel, enabling her apparently to step into imagined foreign landscapes, strongly experiencing these virtual environments. This article draws on cognitive and linguistic notions to describe these metaleptic events, including contextual frames, transportation, immersion, embodiment, deictic transfer, and granularity. The type of metalepsis which occurs in this story seems likely to facilitate the reader’s immersion in the character’s imagined contexts, but these imagined worlds must also be abruptly abandoned due to the imagining character’s domestic pressures.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Elspeth Davie’s “A map of the world”
  • 3.Theoretical background
    • 3.1Transportation, immersion and embodiment
    • 3.2Metalepsis
    • 3.3Contextual frames
    • 3.4The direction of deictic transfer
    • 3.5Granularity
  • 4.Analysis of Elspeth Davie’s “A map of the world”
    • 4.1Background to the story: Overall contextual structure
    • 4.2Border crossing and imagined worlds
  • 5.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
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