My paper will discuss the use of Topic Maps to explore literary topics and navigate TEI-encoded literary texts. The presentation will include a brief introduction to Topic Maps and the XML Topic Map (XTM) syntax; an argument for the benefits of Topic Maps and similar metadata and ontology formats in electronic text and textual analysis applications; examples of fully-developed topic maps describing poetic genres and verse forms as well as the life and work of an individual author, Victorian poet Algernon Charles Swinburne. The presentation will conclude with a demonstration an open source Topic Map toolkit, developed by the author and consisting of a Java-based web application and XSLT stylesheets for the presentation and navigation of XML-based Topic Maps.