Early Modern English Literature and the Poetics of Cartographic Anxiety

Abstract

Though the Renaissance map—made newly accurate and newly ubiquitous by the Cartographic Revolution—delighted, inspired, and fascinated, it also unsettled, upset, and disturbed sixteenth- and seventeenth-century readers. Early Modern English Literature and the Poetics of Cartographic Anxiety is the first monograph to demonstrate how early modern anxieties about maps and map logics accompanied an early modern poetics of representational crisis. The book first considers the manifold ways that the cartographic provoked suspicion, unease, and even hostility in early modern Britain, and it highlights literature’s sensitivity to the map’s representational deceptions and politically menacing implications. Second, it explores how Renaissance English literature, and specifically epic poetry, mounted a sustained critique of cartographic materials, of their strategies of representation, and of their often realpolitik, strategically distortive uses. In considering the ways epic poetry channels anxieties about cartographic technologies into a critique of early modern literature’s own protocols of representation, the bookpursues an early modern poetics of anxiety, one that productively complicates concepts of allegory, description, personification, bibliographic materiality, narrative, temporality, analogy and other elements of literary representation. Early Modern English Literature and the Poetics of Cartographic Anxiety reads three major poems of the period—Spenser’s The Faerie Queene (1590, 1596), Drayton’s Poly-Olbion (1612, 1622), and 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 inflects early modern and contemporary accounts of representation itself.