Mapping Discord: Allegorical Cartography in Early Modern French Writing

by Jeffrey N. Peters

Overview

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 the 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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781611492408
Publisher:	University Press Copublishing Division
Publication date:	06/01/2004
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	286
Product dimensions:	6.20(w) x 9.30(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

Jeffrey N. Peters is Associate Professor of French at the University of Kentucky.

Table of Contents

	List of Illustrations	9
	Acknowledgments	11
	Note on Translations	13
	Introduction	17
1.	From Cosmography to Cartography: Power and Representation in Early Modern French Maps	45
	Writing Space	48
	From Space to Place: Champlain in Quebec	55
	Abstraction as Metaphor	67
	Monarchy and the Representation of Space	74
2.	Mapping Nonsense: Meaning and Transgression in Scudery's "Carte de Tendre"	83
	The Space of Meaning	88
	Mapping Tendre	93
	The Conversation as Map	100
	Allegory and Subversion	103
	Terrae incognitae	114
3.	The Rape of "Tendre" and the Violence of Mapping	117
	Rewriting Tendre	118
	Francois d'Aubignac's History of Time	126
	Boileau and the Disciplinary Map	140
4.	Eloquence at the Boundaries: Academic Cartography in Furetiere and Sorel	147
	In Defense of Eloquence	151
	Sorel Responds	162
	The Boundaries of Allegory	170
5.	Mapping the Ancients and Moderns: On the Discursive History of Allegorical Cartography	177
	The Shield as Globe	180
	The Absent Center	189
	In the Temple of Saturn	197
	Callieres and the Persistence of Rhetoric	209
	Conclusion	212
	Notes	218
	Bibliography	261
	Index	279