A globe of countries: Carto-geographic consciousness and the production of early modern English literature, 1516-1616

This dissertation charts the growth of a carto-geographic consciousness in England from the early sixteenth through the seventeenth century and its influence on the production of new literary forms and the representation of social and economic space within early modern English literature and culture. Maps, surveying treatises, and new literary genres like utopian fiction, historical drama, and estate praise poems figure prominently in accounts of England's transition from a pre-capitalist monarchy to an early modern proto-capitalist nation-state. However, close examination suggests that these materials inscribe anxiety about and even resistance to the latter's emergence more than they mark its arrival.;Chapters one and two treat More's Utopia and the new cartography. Establishing More's familiarity with contemporary cartographic and mathematical materials, this section demonstrates that Utopia employs them as a counter to humanistic discussions about service to the state and proposals for the expansion of England's territories. Utopia's cartographic inscription renders the text as a complex map pointing the way to England's antipodal double, Utopia itself, as a historical counterfactual to England's "official" history and a truncated yet abiding possibility that haunts or shadows England's present.;Chapters three and four examine two events frequently taken as marking England's emerging self-understanding as a modern nation: the publication of Christopher Saxton's county atlas and the dominance throughout the 1590s of the English history play. Readings of Sir William Cecil's annotated and supplemented version of Saxton's atlas (Royal MS 18 D. III) and Shakespeare's Henry the Fourth, Part One demonstrate that these signal events inscribe persistent regional and local divisions that trouble the nationalist project.;Chapters five and six analyze Norden's Surveyor's Dialogue alongside estate maps and papers as part of surveyors' efforts to fashion themselves as expert mediators among landlords, tenants, and equity courts and how this encouraged publication in the form of dialogues. While the growth of the surveying profession in the sixteenth century is commonly seen as marking a decisive turn toward a proto-capitalist form of English social relations, the cartographic thinking informing Jonson's "To Penshurst" suggests the surveyor's continuing position as mediator within the estate economy.