Early Modern English Literature and the Poetics of Cartographic Anxiety. Chris Barrett. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018. Pp. xi+227.

Abstract

These three major works have featured prominently in scholarship on literature and cartography, and some of Barrett’s findings echo those of her predecessors (notably Richard Helgerson, Bernhard Klein, Rhonda Lemke Sanford, D. K. Smith). Early Modern English Literature and the Poetics of Cartographic Anxiety is remarkable for its attentiveness to genre (epic and, more broadly, poetry) and to the relationship between cartography and the environment. Barrett’s reading of genre is productive. Epic fixates repeatedly on national origins—and hence is in a sense implicitly cartographic—but in so doing rethinks questions of temporality and historicity. This is in contrast to maps, which purport to freeze-frame place and time in a single moment (a freezing that is itself a fiction). Epic, then, lends itself to cartographic thinking but in its attentiveness to historicity inherently critiques it. Productive too is Barrett’s consideration of literary technique and the limits of poetics. All three works wrestle with the irreducibility of space to poetic representation; hence why Spenser’s fairyland, Drayton’s counties of England, and Milton’s Eden/world/cosmos seem to recede from view even as the poems get closer to them, as the primary literary technique in all three works (allegory, personification, analogy) cannot quite surmount the challenges set down for them when it comes to representation space and place. Yet it is at these crisis points that each writer articulates his poetic aesthetics and his poetic ethics.