Literature, Mapping, and the Politics of Space in Early Modern Britain

by Edited by Andrew Gordon , Bernhard Klein

• ISBN13: 9780521169431
• ISBN10: 0521169437
• Edition: Reprint
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2010-12-16
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

Mapping has become a key term in current critical discourse, describing a particular cognitive mode of gaining control over the world, of synthesising cultural and geographical information, and of successfully navigating both physical and mental space. In this 2001 collection, an international team of renaissance scholars analyses the material practice behind this semiotic concept. By examining map-driven changes in gender identities, body conception, military practices, political structures, national imaginings and imperial aspirations, the essays in this volume expose the multi-layered investments of historical 'paper landscapes' in the politics of space. Ranging widely across visual and textual artifacts implicated in the culture of mapping, from the literature of Shakespeare, Spenser, Marlowe and Jonson, to representations of body, city, nation and empire, Literature, Mapping, and the Politics of Space argues for a thorough re-evaluation of the impact of cartography on the shaping of social and political identities in early modern Britain.

Table of Contents

List of illustrations

Preface

Notes on contributors

Introduction

Contested Spaces

Absorption and representation: mapping England in the early modern House of Commons

A map of Greater Cambria

Britannia rules the waves?: images of Empire in Elizabethan England

Performing London: the map and the city in ceremony

Visible bodies: cartography and anatomy

Literature and Landscape

The scene of cartography in King Lear

Unlawful presences: the politics of military space and the problem of women in Tamburlaine

Marginal waters: Pericles and the idea of jurisdiction

'On the famous voyage': Ben Jonson and civic space

Imaginary journeys: Spenser, Drayton, and the poetics of national space

Do real knights need maps? Charting moral, geographical and representational uncertainty in Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene Joanne

Epilogue

The folly of maps and modernity Richard Helgerson

Select bibliography

Table of Contents provided by Publisher. All Rights Reserved.