Robbie McLaughlan maps the fin de si?cle mission to open up the "Dark Continent." Although nineteenth-century map-makers imposed topographic definition upon a perceived geographical void, writers of adventure fiction, and other colonial writers, continued to nourish the idea of a cartographic absence in their work. McLaughlan explores the effects of this epistemological blankness in fin de si?cle literature, and its impact upon early Modernist culture, through the emerging discipline of psychoanalysis and the debt that Freud owed to African exploration. As Robbie McLaughlan demonstrates, it was the late Victorian "best-seller" which merged an arcane Central African imagery with an interest in psychic phenomena.