| By examining the play of key words from Renaissance discourses on land surveying ("profit," "rule," "eye" and "view") in pastoral poetry, epic and training manuals for surveyors, my dissertation explores the relationship between so-called "technical" and "aesthetic" language in negotiating the transition from feudalism to agrarian capitalism. In tracing its effects, I argue that "surveying" was more than an isolated and arcane technique; it was a "way of seeing" in which numerous discourses and practices throughout the social formation of Early Modern England took part as class, property, body and gender relations were re-formed. I argue that the idiom of capitalism differs in significant ways from the idiom of feudalism, and, thus, that changes in the use of key words can signal larger changes in the social formation.;First I read John Norden's Surveyor's Dialogue, focusing both on his use of the word "profit" and his dialogue format as indicators of an attempt to identify and assimilate potential dissent to new, market-oriented agrarian practices, a monologic effort masquerading in dialogic form. Next I read Aaron Rathborne's Surveyor in Four Books, a text which, through a pun on the word "rule," offers a paradigm of social order based on reason and mathematics rather than feudal hierarchy grounded in a prince.;From there, I move on to a reading of country house poetry, perhaps the most explicitly spatially interested of literary genres. In particular, I focus on Marvell's "Upon Appleton House," a poem which, unlike its generic predecessors, narrates "enclosure" and advocates privacy and the private property relations which guarantee it, as the rural ideal. I then look at the "place" of women in the Faerie Queene, and argue that at the moment of transition in England, women were obliged to remain in the place of the feudal past, an obligation marked in the text by the settling in place of the female characters, while the male heroes move on. Finally, I situate my own project by looking at a spatial crisis of the late twentieth century as it works itself out in academic theoretical discourses which rely on metaphors of "mapping.". |
