Abstract: The ocean presents unique problems for the literary cartographer. Its vast watery expanse has no stable or distinctive toponyms, no places to record or landmarks to highlight, and the only paths available are those carved through the waves by invisible currents. So much of the world's surface is covered by this oceanic space, where so little can be seen or mapped. And yet this space is also the site of one of the most fantastic of literary forms, the sea narrative, a genre that seems to combine the journalistic reporting of the travel narrative with the high adventures of wild romance. From the late eighteenth century, at least, the development of the sea narrative accompanied radical transformations of the global economy, as the oceanic spaces of mere trade became integral to the production processes of capital. The sea narrative was a crucial form in making sense of this changing world system, as the perspective of the shipboard individual at once connected the subjective experience of ocean space with the incomprehensible totality of the world system. Writers such as Herman Melville and Joseph Conrad struggled to represent this space even as the spaces resisted representation. In the sea narrative, the interplay of nature, society, individuality, and textuality establishes a complex, dynamic set of coordinates upon which the literary cartography of oceanic spaces can be attempted. This article discusses the challenge to literary cartography presented by oceanic spaces, and argues that the sea narrative as a genre functions as an effective way of mapping these distinctively atopian andheterotopian zones.

Key words: literary cartography, sea narratives, world system, atopia, heterotopia