Early Modern English Literature and the Poetics of Cartographic Anxiety

The last thirty years have witnessed an explosion of interest in Renaissance maps, cartography, and representations of space, fueled in part by a revolution in mapping technology that has suddenly allowed our phones to guide us to our destinations or to zoom in on an image of our house taken from an orbiting satellite. Chris Barrett's erudite and insightful book engages this material while considering the peculiar and sometimes fraught ways that English Protestant poets reacted to their own era's cartographic turn. * Blaine Greteman, Milton Quarterly * Although preeminently a work of literary criticism, Barrett's book remains grounded in the history of cartography and more-general ideas about space. Barrett fills her book with fascinating and apposite details ... this book kept me thinking and scrawling notes for reasons beyond this review. Barrett convinces me of the importance of how these three authors engage with the concepts of space implicit in the cartographic revolution they witnessed. Barrett also convinces me to look more closely at the next map I see, and to think about what it says and does not say about the world and our experience of it. * Sean Henry, Clio * ...this is a work of considerable intellectual commitment and authority, deeply immersed in the complex literary texts on which Barrett focuses and founded upon exceptional skills of textual analysis. * Andrew McRae, Spenser Review *