The aim of the article is to reinterpret the landscapes created by Eliza Orzeszkowa with the use of the tools offered by geocritics and geopoetics. It enables treating topography as the main element of the literary landscape, which – in the case of Orzeszkowa – creates the landscape itself. Topography/’topographic experience’ contains the landscape and makes it visible. Using some selected examples, the author of the article explains how space has been created and which senses it evokes.
The literary works represent a genuine source for researching and understanding the geographical space. Most of the time, this space is perceived and figured in various ways by the different authors referring to it. When available, the best way to study these mental representations is by using maps created by the authors themselves. This article concentrates on Liviu Rebreanu’s novel “The Uprising” and on the map which helped him to better depict the plot and the characters. The cartographical representation was created by Liviu Rebreanu and was published together with other drafts from the author’s personal archive. The paper analyzes the map using cartographical, historical and literary sources with the aim of understanding how the author reshaped the real space to better suit his literary imagination. In the end, the study explains how these kind of maps could be interpreted using a geocritical approach.
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