The writer as map maker.

Abstract

The Journeyman Years is a postmodern historical conspiracy fiction novel chronicling the life and travels of John Riven, a sixteenth-century apprentice alchemist and mapmaker, on a quest to find a mysterious religious relic which he believes holds the secret to the meaning of life. The exegesis situates my writing within the context of postmodern literature and demonstrates how the postmodern author might narrate the journey of self-discovery through an interweaving of three recurring motifs of both historical conspiracy fiction and the critical field of semiotics: codes, maps and symbols. Through an analysis of the critical and creative works of semiotician and postmodern fiction author Umberto Eco – in particular his novel Foucault’s Pendulum – the thesis explores how the interplay of these three motifs serves an examination of question of the limit of interpretation, and how they might combine to offer a framework for responding to this question within a postmodern work of historical conspiracy fiction.