The Self Made Map

The self-made map argues that during the Renaissance in France a "new cartographic impulse" affected both the "graphic and imaginary forms of literature." In this wide-ranging and fascinating work, Tom Conley demonstrates that as maps were plotted during this period, a new sense of self emerged, one defined in part by the relationship of the self to space. Conley traces the explosion of interest in mapmaking that occurred with the discovery of the New World, and discusses the commensurate rise of what he defines as cartographic writing - writing that "holds, penetrates, delineates, and explores space." Considering the works of such writers as Rabelais, Montaigne, and Descartes, Conley provides a "navigation" through the printed page, revealing the emerging values of Renaissance France. Conley also exposes the ideological exercise inherent in mapmaking, arguing that Renaissance cartography is inseparably bound up with the politics of the era. He undertakes close readings of maps and illustrations, discussing the necessity of viewing Renaissance maps in the context of their typographic layout, graphic reproduction, and literary and ideological import.

Almost all leadership books assume that the leader has authority over their team members. The challenge of project management in a matrix-structured environment is that this is not always the case. A whole new plan of attack has to be executed for the project manager to deliver in an organization where they do not have formal authority. This book t

Throughout his life, maps have been a source of imagination and wonder for Christopher Norment. Mesmerized by them since the age of eight or nine, he found himself courted and seduced by maps, which served functional and allegorical roles in showing him worlds that he might come to know and helping him understand worlds that he had already explored. Maps may have been the stuff of his dreams, but they sometimes drew him away from places where he should have remained firmly rooted. In the Memory of the Map explores the complex relationship among maps, memory, and experience—what might be called a “cartographical psychology” or “cartographical history.” Interweaving a personal narrative structured around a variety of maps, with stories about maps as told by scholars, poets, and fiction writers, this book provides a dazzlingly rich personal and intellectual account of what many of us take for granted. A dialog between desire and the maps of his life, an exploration of the pleasures, utilitarian purposes, benefits, and character of maps, this rich and powerful personal narrative is the matrix in which Norment embeds an exploration of how maps function in all our lives. Page by page, readers will confront the aesthetics, mystery, function, power, and shortcomings of maps, causing them to reconsider the role that maps play in their lives.

Global Crusoe travels across the twentieth-century globe, from a Native American reservation to a Botswanan village, to explore the huge variety of contemporary incarnations of Daniel Defoe's intrepid character. In her study of the novels, poems, short stories and films that adapt the Crusoe myth, Ann Marie Fallon argues that the twentieth-century Crusoe is not a lone, struggling survivor, but a cosmopolitan figure who serves as a warning against the dangers of individual isolation and colonial oppression. Fallon uses feminist and postcolonial theory to reexamine Defoe's original novel and several contemporary texts, showing how writers take up the traumatic narratives of Crusoe in response to the intensifying transnational and postcolonial experiences of the second half of the twentieth century. Reading texts by authors such as Nadine Gordimer, Bessie Head, Derek Walcott, Elizabeth Bishop, and J.M. Coetzee within their social, historical and political contexts, Fallon shows how contemporary revisions of the novel reveal the tensions inherent in the transnational project as people and ideas move across borders with frequency, if not necessarily with ease. In the novel Robinson Crusoe, Crusoe's discovery of 'Friday's footprint' fills him with such anxiety that he feels the print like an animal and burrows into his shelter. Likewise, modern readers and writers continue to experience a deep anxiety when confronting the narrative issues at the center of Crusoe's story.

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.

Each of the maps featured in this book was showcased in the exhibition “Canada before Confederation: Early Exploration and Mapping,” which took place in several locations, both in Canada and abroad, in Fall of 2017. The authors provide a scholarly study highlighting the importance and unique features of each of these jewels of cartographic history, with particular attention paid to how they demonstrate the development of Canadian identity at the same time that they reveal Indigenous knowledge of the lands now known as Canada.