Mapping Discord examines a series of allegorical maps published in France during the seventeenth century that cast in spatial terms a number of heated aesthetic and social debates. It discusses the convergence of map-making and literary creation in the context of early modern cartographic practice, and demonstrates that the unique language of allegorical cartography raises important theoretical questions about the relations between rationalist discourses of science and the figural designs of imaginative writing. In detailed analyses of the imaginary maps that appeared in seventeenth-century novels and stories, as well as of maps, atlases, and geographic treatises produced by professional scholars and engineers of the period, Mapping Discord considers the ideological structure and uses of cartographic language, and argues that allegorical maps have much to tell us about the potential capacity of every map to operate as a visual metaphor for power. Illustrated, Jeffrey N. Peters is Associate Professor of French at the University of Kentucky.

Love is a key ingredient in the stereotypical fairy-tale ending in which everyone lives happily ever after. This romantic formula continues to influence contemporary ideas about love and marriage, but it ignores the history of love as an emotion that shapes and is shaped by hierarchies of power including gender, class, education, and social status. This interdisciplinary study questions the idealization of love as the ultimate happy ending by showing how the conteuses, the women writers who dominated the first French fairy-tale vogue in the 1690s, used the fairy-tale genre to critique the power dynamics of courtship and marriage. Their tales do not sit comfortably in the fairy-tale canon as they explore the good, the bad, and the ugly effects of love and marriage on the lives of their heroines. Bronwyn Reddan argues that the conteuses’ scripts for love emphasize the importance of gender in determining the “right” way to love in seventeenth-century France. Their version of fairy-tale love is historical and contingent rather than universal and timeless. This conversation about love compels revision of the happily-ever-after narrative and offers incisive commentary on the gendered scripts for the performance of love in courtship and marriage in seventeenth-century France.

This book addresses the role and importance of space in the respective fields of the social sciences and the humanities. It discusses how map representations and mapping processes can inform ongoing intellectual debates or open new avenues for scholarly inquiry within and across disciplines, including a wide array of significant developments in spatial processes, including the Internet, global positioning system (GPS), affordable digital photography and mobile technologies. Last but not least it reviews and assesses recent research challenges across disciplines that enhance our understanding of spatial processes and mapping at scales ranging from the molecular to the galactic.

Operative Mapping investigates the use of maps as a design tool, providing insight with the potential to benefit education and practice in the design disciplines. The book’s fundamental aim is to offer a methodological contribution to the design disciplines, both in conceptual and instrumental terms. When added to the resources of contemporary design, operative mapping overcomes the analytical and strictly instrumental approaches of maps, opening up the possibility of working both pragmatically and critically by acknowledging the need for an effective transformation of the milieu based on an understanding of pre-existing conditions. The approach is pragmatic, not only discussing the present but, above all, generating a toolbox to help expand on the objectives, methodologies and formats of design in the immediate future. The book joins together a review of the theoretical body of work on mapping from the social sciences with case studies from the past 30 years in architecture, planning and landscape design in the interest of linking past practices with future ones.

Edmund Spenser and the romance of space seeks to gauge the roles that aesthetic subjectivity and the imagination play in early modern spatial and textual practices.

In The Written World: Space, Literature, and the Chorological Imagination in Early Modern France, Jeffrey N. Peters argues that geographic space may be understood as a foundational, originating principle of literary creation. By way of an innovative reading of chora, a concept developed by Plato in the Timaeus and often construed by philosophical tradition as “space,” Peters shows that canonical literary works of the French seventeenth century are guided by what he calls a “chorological” approach to artistic invention. The chorological imagination describes the poetic as a cosmological event that gives location to—or, more accurately, in Plato’s terms, receives—the world as an object of thought. In analyses of well-known authors such as Corneille, Molière, Racine, and Madame de Lafayette, Peters demonstrates that the apparent absence of physical space in seventeenth-century literary depiction indicates a subtle engagement with, rather than a rejection of, evolving principles of cosmological understanding. Space is not absent in these works so much as transformed in keeping with contemporaneous developments in early modern natural philosophy. The Written World will appeal to philosophers of literature and literary theorists as well as scholars of early modern Europe and historians of science and geography

A contemporary follow-up to the groundbreaking Power of Maps, this book takes a fresh look at what maps do, whose interests they serve, and how they can be used in surprising, creative, and radical ways. Denis Wood describes how cartography facilitated the rise of the modern state and how maps continue to embody and project the interests of their creators. He demystifies the hidden assumptions of mapmaking and explores the promises and limitations of diverse counter-mapping practices today. Thought-provoking illustrations include U.S. Geological Survey maps; electoral and transportation maps; and numerous examples of critical cartography, participatory GIS, and map art.

Baroque, the cultural period extending from the mid-sixteenth to the mid-eighteenth century, created some of the world's most striking monuments, music, artworks, and literature. This Handbook goes beyond all existing studies by presenting Baroque not only as a style, but also as a global cultural phenomenon arising in response to enormous religious, political, and technological changes.

The relationship of texts and maps, and the mappability of literature, examined from Homer to Houellebecq. Literary authors have frequently called on elements of cartography to ground fictional space, to visualize sites, and to help readers get their bearings in the imaginative world of the text. Today, the convergence of digital mapping and globalization has spurred a cartographic turn in literature. This book gathers leading scholars to consider the relationship of literature and cartography. Generously illustrated with full-color maps and visualizations, it offers the first systematic overview of an emerging approach to the study of literature. The literary map is not merely an illustrative guide but represents a set of relations and tensions that raise questions about representation, fiction, and space. Is literature even mappable? In exploring the cartographic components of literature, the contributors have not only brought literary theory to bear on the map but have also enriched the vocabulary and perspectives of literary studies with cartographic terms. After establishing the theoretical and methodological terrain, they trace important developments in the history of literary cartography, considering topics that include Homer and Joyce, Goethe and the representation of nature, and African cartographies. Finally, they consider cartographic genres that reveal the broader connections between texts and maps, discussing literary map genres in American literature and the coexistence of image and text in early maps. When cartographic aspirations outstripped factual knowledge, mapmakers turned to textual fictions. Contributors Jean-Marc Besse, Bruno Bosteels, Patrick M. Bray, Martin Brückner, Tom Conley, Jörg Dünne, Anders Engberg-Pedersen, John K. Noyes, Ricardo Padrón, Barbara Piatti, Simone Pinet, Clara Rowland, Oliver Simons, Robert Stockhammer, Dominic Thomas, Burkhardt Wolf

Anthony Vidler, an internationally recognized scholar, theorist, and critic of modern and contemporary architecture, is widely known for his essays on the most pressing issues and debates in the field. This volume brings together a collection of such writings—including the iconic, long unavailable “Scenes of the Street”—into one volume.Scenes of the Street and Other Essaysshowcases Vidler’s engaging and accessible expertise on both contemporary and historic subjects that are relevant to today's concerns. “Scenes of the Street,” a multi-faceted analysis of city planning is one such example; other essays in this volume include “Unknown Lands: Guy Debord and the Cartographies of a Landscape to be Invented,” “Transparency and Utopia: Constructing the Void from Pascal to Foucault,” and “The Modern Acropolis: Tony Garnier from La Cité Antique to the Cité Industrielle.” Vidler writes in his introduction: In the following essays, I have interrogated the struggle for an urban architecture in the modern period, its critiques and aspirations, in the belief that understanding the historical dimensions of the debate will lead to a renewal of interest in an architecture calculated to redeem, if only partially, our “planet of slums” and its deteriorating environment; an interest that will not simply reject “utopia” out of hand or fall back into the complacencies of nostalgia. Written during a period in which the debates themselves were actively engaged by critics and supporters of modernism, they reflect contemporary issues as they search for their prehistory. As historical inquiries, they inevitably also engage the transformations in history writing itself since 1970, intellectual responses to the social and political conditions of postwar modernity. This fascinating series of essays on issues and figures is an invaluable resource for architects and art historians and enthusiasts of structure and substance alike.