Immersed in imagined landscapes

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.