In this Book
- AN Errant Eye: Poetry and Topography in Early Modern France
- Book
- 2011
- Published by: University of Minnesota Press
summary
An Errant Eye studies how topography, the art of describing local space and place, developed literary and visual form in early modern France. Arguing for a "new poetics of space" ranging throughout French Renaissance poetry, prose, and cartography, Tom Conley performs dazzling readings of maps, woodcuts, and poems to plot a topographical shift in the late Renaissance in which space, subjectivity, and politics fall into crisis. He charts the paradox of a period whose demarcation of national space through cartography is rendered unstable by an ambient world of printed writing.
This tension, Conley demonstrates, cuts through literature and graphic matter of various shapes and forms-hybrid genres that include the comic novel, the emblem-book, the eclogue, sonnets, and the personal essay. An Errant Eye differs from historical treatments of spatial invention through Conley's argument that the topographic sensibility is one in which the ocular faculty, vital to the description of locale, is endowed with tact and touch.
Detailed close readings of Apian, Rabelais, Montaigne, and others empower the reader with a lively sense of the topographical impulse, deriving from Conley's own "errant eye," which is singularly discerning in attentiveness to the ambiguities of charted territory, the contours of woodcut images, and the complex combinations of word and figure in French Renaissance poetry, emblem, and politics.
Table of Contents
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- Title Page, Copyright Page
- pp. 2-5
- Preface and Acknowledgments
- pp. vii-x
- Introduction: A Snail’s Eye
- pp. 1-26
- 1. Rabelais: Worlds Introjected
- pp. 27-52
- 2. The Apian Way
- pp. 53-80
- 4. A Poet in Relief: Maurice Scève
- pp. 117-148
- 6. Montaigne and His Swallows
- pp. 177-200
- Conclusion: A Tactile Eye
- pp. 201-208
- Bibliography
- pp. 229-240
Additional Information
ISBN
9780816675012
Related ISBN(s)
9780816669653
MARC Record
OCLC
704267576
Pages
264
Launched on MUSE
2014-01-01
Language
English
Open Access
No