Cosmographical Glasses: Geographic Discourse, Gender, and Elizabethan FictionA fresh perspective on Elizabethan fiction In Cosmographical Glasses Constance Relihan examines the ways in which sixteenth-century English texts--traveler's reports, ethnographic studies, and geographic guides--provide the foundation for how fictional prose of the period envisions the locations in which its tales are set. Relihan suggests that this nonfictional discourse becomes central to how the fictional prose of the period imagines cultural identity, fictional purpose, and gender identity. Places and cultures were defined in opposition to each other in early modern romances. In the examples in Cosmographical Glasses, writers attempt to define the spaces of their texts in an effort to identify what it means to be male, English, and Elizabethan. Through these texts, Relihan considers the various ways in which fictional pieces seize the spirit of ethnographic and geographic texts, as well as the ways in which historically identifiable and overtly fictional places were used to complicate representations of utopian fantasies. A number of prose romances and novella collections and their use of historical and geographical facts are analyzed in order to explore the associations between the genre, the discourses of colonialism, and the construction of gender. These texts become "glasses" that reflect and refract the social and cultural realities of early modern England. Those interested in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English literature, the history of the novel, and the influence of travel literature on fictional texts will appreciate Cosmographical Glasses. |
From inside the book
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... material presented to us and be better able to recognize the anomalies that the period's original readers would have recognized , which should alert us to the ways in which the often joyful conclusions of these romances are seriously ...
... material , direct observa- tion , and fantastic legend and because they purport both to describe fairly and to be monuments to the power and glory of a reformed Christian God , the voice with which they speak is complex , always at ...
... material as a portion of Cicero's biography , which Plutarch and Cornelius Nepos excluded from their factual biographies , it studies the ways in which both appeals to biographical truth and to cultural difference use the non - native ...
... material for which Blundeville calls resists easy categorization . In fact , the attempt to identify the early modern discourse of geographic place inevitably leads to what Homi Bhabha refers to as the " slippage of categories " that is ...
... Boemus's reading and his wit — of material culled from his predecessors and from his own mind and thinking , of received knowledge and " realistic shadings . " Direct observation , even in this revised 4 Cosmographical Glasses.
Contents
1 | |
The Gendered and Geographic Glasses of the English Novella | 27 |
Full Works to Excellent Geographers | 45 |
Trapalonia Machilenta and the Uses of Fictional Glasses | 69 |
The Ethnographic Function of Latin | 86 |
Conclusion | 108 |
Notes | 113 |
Works Cited | 134 |
Index | 144 |