Early Modern English Literature and the Poetics of Cartographic Anxiety

Early Modern English Literature and the Poetics of Cartographic Anxiety

Description

The Cartographic Revolution in the Renaissance made maps newly precise, newly affordable, and newly ubiquitous. In sixteenth-century Britain, cartographic materials went from rarity to household decor within a single lifetime, and they delighted, inspired, and fascinated people across thesocioeconomic spectrum. At the same time, they also unsettled, upset, disturbed, and sometimes angered their early modern readers. Early Modern English Literature and the Poetics of Cartographic Anxiety is the first monograph dedicated to recovering the shadow history of the many anxieties provokedby early modern maps and mapping in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.A product of a military arms race, often deployed for security and surveillance purposes, and fundamentally distortive of their subjects, maps provoked suspicion, unease, and even hostility in early modern Britain (in ways not dissimilar from the anxieties provoked by global positioning-enableddigital mapping in the twenty-first century). At the same time, writers saw in the resistance to cartographic logics and strategies the opportunity to rethink the way literature represents space - and everything else. This volume explores three major poems of the period - Edmund Spenser's The FaerieQueene (1590, 1596), Michael Drayton's Poly-Olbion (1612, 1622), and John Milton's Paradise Lost (1667, 1674) - in terms of their vexed and vexing relationships with cartographic materials, and shows how the productive protest staged by these texts redefined concepts of allegory, description,personification, bibliographic materiality, narrative, temporality, analogy, and other elemental components of literary representations.

LOC Call Number

PR428 .M355 B37 2018

ISBN

9780198816874

Publication Date

2018

Department

Department of English

Publisher

Oxford University Press

City

Oxford

Early Modern English Literature and the Poetics of Cartographic Anxiety

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