Wild Animal Skins and Mapping the Victorian Landscape

Because I am interested in the way Victorian writers mapped their surroundings by evoking the metaphor of wild animals and their skins, I have been examining their indebtedness to Victorian geographers who were intrigued by zoogeography and the distribution of animals throughout the world. This presentation will be about these nineteenth-century thematic maps. It will also address the fact that some writers, such as the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins, revised these static, two-dimensional maps to acknowledge a more sensuous and haptic geography.