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. Combining cartographic history with crucial cultural studies and literary analysis, this book examines the construction of social and political space in maps, in cosmography and geography, in historical and political writing, and in he literary works of Marlowe. Shakespeare, Spenser, and Drayton.

This book offers a critical reassessment of the uses of history in contemporary Irish literature and culture. It argues that in much recent Irish writing, history is approached not as the proverbial 'nightmare' from which Joyce's Stephen Dedalus tried to awake, but as a rich, imaginative resource. Drawing on recent debates in Irish literary and cultural criticism, On the uses of history in recent Irish writing explores the varied, creative, and often critically challenging forms of rewriting Ireland's troubled past in contemporary prose, drama and poetry.
Individual chapters focus on...

This collection analyzes the material practice behind the concept of mapping, a particular cognitive mode of gaining control over the world. 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, it argues for a thorough reevaluation of the impact of cartography on the shaping of social and political identities in early modern Britain.