*City views: Writing and the topography of Frenchness in the Renaissance

This project considers how identity comes to be located in the urban landscape, and how an interest in historicizing the city in the Renaissance links topography with subjectivity. In City Views: Writing and the Topography of Frenchness in the Renaissance, I show how the location and expression of Frenchness in early modern Paris figures in a larger phenomenon where spatial knowledge seeks to inform constructions of collective and individual identity in literature and in visual representations. As distinctive articulations of singularity, I show how cities provide a spatial image on which are based new ways of imaging the self in the world as a microcosm. Concurrent with the exploration of the New World and the mobilization of printed materials, the culture of the book and the popularity of the map in consequence emerge as material objects.;Beginning with Francois Villon's Le Grand Testament (1489/1533), I argue that when the self is imagined in the city, spatial conceptions depart from the medieval notion of a world perceived and represented as a totality and as coextensive with religious ideology. At the confluence of historical, political, and literary discourses, city narratives spark new genres, like the guidebook (Gilles Corrozet), city views, and the atlas. Whether depicted in a pictorial fashion in the case of an imagined city view, or in the textual peripaties of a travel narrative, I show how topographical works configure the movement of the traveler through the actual spaces of France while simultaneously promoting a political program that promotes and aggrandizes the landscape of French letters. I then compare how the 'topophilia' behind cartographic projects promotes an emerging nationalist agenda that disseminates visions of the French nation in new literary forms, specifically travel writings and the personal essay. As a rehearsal of thinking and traveling, I show how in Montaigne's oeuvre, the author inscribes both a poetics and a politics of space in the literal topography of his works. Writing that relates travel literally travels in the essays where the necessity for actual physical displacement recasts movement as the literal replacement of the writer's ego in textual portraiture.