Overview

Maps make the world visible, but they also obscure, distort and idealize. This wide ranging study traces the impact of cartography on the changing cultural meanings of space, offering analysis of the mental and material mapping of early modern England and Ireland. Combining cartographic history with critical cultural studies and literary analysis, it examines the construction of social and political space in maps, cosmography and geography, historical and political writing, and in the literary works of Marlowe, Shakespeare, Spenser and Drayton.

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9780333779330

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Reviews

'Many books aspire to be interdisciplinary but few achieve a genuine fusion of different approaches to a body of material. Bernard Klein is a rare exception as he moves from nation to nation, and text to text, with admirable ease, compelling the reader to follow his insights through to the conclusion. This is a major work on Renaissance conceptions of space and deserves to be read by all students of the history, literature and geography of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.' - Andrew Hadfield, Professor of English, University of Wales, Aberystwyth '...lucid, stimulating and revealing.' - Wasafiri 'This is...a rich and deeply engaging book - a genuine work of interdisciplinary scholarship from which everyone interested in early modern culture, politics, literature, and, indeed, science, will have much to learn.' - Andrew Murphy, University of St Andrews, Early Modern Literary Studies '...fascinating reading...' - Steve Hindle, Albion '...a dazzling display of erudition in which not only maps, atlases and estate surveys themselves, but also texts as diverse as treaties on the business of surveying and map-making, contemporary travel documents, dramas, prose and poetry are examined by the author to constitute a convincing account of the ways in which the mapping of the early modern nation was instrumental in the rising consciousness of national selfhood...Klein's Maps and the Writing of Space in Early Modern England and Ireland is a highly polished piece of interdisciplinary scholarship made all the more exciting by the sheer pace of the argumentation...The writing is elegant and witty, but never falters in its consistently high level of conceptualization...Klein's readings are a salutary example, for today's students, of a well-balanced conjunction of theoretical coherence and innovation, historical contextualization and a fine sense of the creative workings of literary texts. For all those interested in the area of early modern cultural and literary studies, his book is to be warmly recommended.' - Russell West '...fascinating reading. Klein's analysis is invariably original despite the familiarity of so many of the sources with which he is working...The implications of Klein's arguments for the production of social and political relations in early modern England are wide-ranging...It is to Klein's credit that his fine book is equally sensitive to the potential of maps both to exhibit, and to deny, the existence of political and cultural difference.' - Steve Hindle, University of Warwick '...highly effective in teasing out a number of the tangled geographical strands in Early Modern culture and revealing the 'cartographic investment in the production of cultural meaning'...Klein frankly declares that 'my discussion of cartography in these chapters is ultimately less motivated by an interest in the history of maps than in the culture of mapping'. As an exploration of this general culture in its Early Modern form Maps and the Writing of Space is excellent...lucid, stimulating and revealing' - Jess Edwards, Wasafiri

'Many books aspire to be interdisciplinary but few achieve a genuine fusion of different approaches to a body of material. Bernard Klein is a rare exception as he moves from nation to nation, and text to text, with admirable ease, compelling the reader to follow his insights through to the conclusion. This is a major work on Renaissance conceptions of space and deserves to be read by all students of the history, literature and geography of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.' - Andrew Hadfield, Professor of English, University of Wales, Aberystwyth '...lucid, stimulating and revealing.' - Wasafiri 'This is...a rich and deeply engaging book - a genuine work of interdisciplinary scholarship from which everyone interested in early modern culture, politics, literature, and, indeed, science, will have much to learn.' - Andrew Murphy, University of St Andrews, Early Modern Literary Studies '...fascinating reading...' - Steve Hindle, Albion '...a dazzling display of erudition in which not only maps, atlases and estate surveys themselves, but also texts as diverse as treaties on the business of surveying and map-making, contemporary travel documents, dramas, prose and poetry are examined by the author to constitute a convincing account of the ways in which the mapping of the early modern nation was instrumental in the rising consciousness of national selfhood...Klein's Maps and the Writing of Space in Early Modern England and Ireland is a highly polished piece of interdisciplinary scholarship made all the more exciting by the sheer pace of the argumentation...The writing is elegant and witty, but never falters in its consistently high level of conceptualization...Klein's readings are a salutary example, for today's students, of a well-balanced conjunction of theoretical coherence and innovation, historical contextualization and a fine sense of the creative workings of literary texts. For all those interested in the area of early modern cultural and literary studies, his book is to be warmly recommended.' - Russell West '...fascinating reading. Klein's analysis is invariably original despite the familiarity of so many of the sources with which he is working...The implications of Klein's arguments for the production of social and political relations in early modern England are wide-ranging...It is to Klein's credit that his fine book is equally sensitive to the potential of maps both to exhibit, and to deny, the existence of political and cultural difference.' - Steve Hindle, University of Warwick '...highly effective in teasing out a number of the tangled geographical strands in Early Modern culture and revealing the 'cartographic investment in the production of cultural meaning'...Klein frankly declares that 'my discussion of cartography in these chapters is ultimately less motivated by an interest in the history of maps than in the culture of mapping'. As an exploration of this general culture in its Early Modern form Maps and the Writing of Space is excellent...lucid, stimulating and revealing' - Jess Edwards, Wasafiri

Author Information

BERNHARD KLEIN is Lecturer in English and Cultural Studies at the University of Dortmund. He is editor (with Andrew Gordon) of Paper Landscapes, Literature, Mapping, and the Politics of Space in Early Modern Britain.

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