John Donne’s Use of Space
Gorton, Lisa
Early Modern Literary Studies 4.2/ Special Issue 3 (September, 1998)
Abstract
John Donne’s writing shows he was fascinated by new discoveries. He took up the modern idiom of maps and discovery with delight. But he was also deeply attached to the past, and his assumptions about space belonged to an old tradition: a cosmographic rather than cartographic way of imagining space. This paper is about Donne’s spatial imagination: its cosmographic assumptions, and its many contradictions — between old and new ways of imagining the cosmos, between cosmographic and cartographic ways of imagining the world, and between his spatial imagination itself and his narrative voice.
Click here to read/download this article (HTML file)
Related posts:
- “On the Famous Voyage”: Ben Jonson and Civic Space
- Partial Views: Shakespeare and the Map of Ireland
- “This innocent worke”: Adam and Eve, John Smith, William Wood and the North American Plantations
- Translated Geographies: Edmund Spenser’s “The Ruines of Time”
- Elizabeth Cary’s Mariam and the Critique of Pure Reason