The eye of history: Literature and cartography in the colonial encounter

This study examines the dynamics of representation in narrative and maps through an analysis of verb families linked to eyesight and interpretations of landscape description in poetry and prose. It begins in Early Modern England, where there was an ongoing debate over the value of different modes of representation. Sidney and Gosson, for example, argued about the usefulness and effect of literary representation, and another conflict existed between exponents of literary representation and exponents of cartography. Cartographers such as John Norden and Jonathan Speed argued for the inadequacy of narrative as a descriptive mode. Edmund Spenser displayed the susceptibility of maps to manipulation and propagandistic use in his poetry. Concurrent with the rise of the map were territorial nationalism and landscape poetry. Both phenomena reflect the commodification of land.;In India, the Royal Geographic Society participated in the spread of English culture through cartographic practices. Rudyard Kipling's Kim develops a narrative style that inculcates the perspective of the map within its landscapes, and ultimately constructs the identity of Kim in cartographic terms. Salman Rushdie, in Midnight's Children, deconstructs that narrative mode, presenting multiple perspectives on identity and nationhood instead of mimicking the monocular perspective of cartography.;The linkage of territorial nationalism and cartography also riddles discourse on Irish nationalism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. W. B. Yeats argues for a poetics that redescribes the Irish landscape outside the terms established by the English. James Joyce criticizes this literary nationalism in terms explicitly linked to cartography.