University of Virginia Press Against the Map: The Politics of Geography in Eighteenth-Century Britain

Product Description null Review This ambitious book gathers a stunning variety of maps and texts across the long eighteenth century to show how local spaces refashion themselves in relation to the nation as that nation behaves imperially towards its own. --Cynthia Wall, University of Virginia Press, author of Grammars of Approach: Landscape, Narrative, and the Linguistic PicturesqueSills persuasively argues that there is no coherent British national identity based on a coherent mapping of national space. Rather, national identity hinged on local places and neighborhoods through which the individual connected with the national. The nature of those neighborhoods was the subject of diverse discourses, promoted by the emergent public sphere and shaped through their interplay of textual and graphic maps. An original book grounded on wide-ranging but secure scholarship. --Matthew H. Edney, University of Southern Maine, author of Cartography: The Ideal and Its History About the Author Adam Sills is Associate Professor of English at Hofstra University.