Myths, Geographies, and Forms: Place and Person in Early Modern English Literature

Description

A workshop organised as part of the Bristol-Kyoto exchange. Spenser and the Writing of Geography: Land This paper focuses on the section of Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene which frames Britomart’s encounter with Merlin. Here, the poet blends poetry with cosmography, which thinks on a universal spatial scale, and with chorography, which is intimately concerned with the local, and the relationship between place and history. The paper thus explores how Spenser’s poetry interacts with two different kinds of geographical practice, and considers how the art of Spenser’s Merlin is used to mobilise certain aspects of the relationship between geography, text and the imagination. For Spenser, to write is to almost always make geographies of some kind; sometimes they are of the imagination and sometimes they act in imitation, but always, I argue, they attempt to give to ‘forms of things unknown [...] a local habitation and a name’.

Period	Jan 2013
Event type	Workshop
Location	Bristol, United Kingdom