Time River Body

Relying on sustained, relentless personification, Drayton’s chorographical epic Poly-Olbion retains the ethical work of The Faerie Queene ’s allegory in restoring to the national narrative the embodied immanence of the people within it; but Drayton’s poem takes personification as its dominant representation mode. The poem explores and exploits the paradoxical nature of personification, a device that is simultaneously evocative and anti-mimetic. The case of personification demonstrates the ways description distances itself from its subject, and Poly-Olbion uses its personified topography to interrogate the very possibility of representing space—in cartographic image or topographical text—by troubling the temporal assumptions underlying the cartographic and problematizing the relationship between description and detail. In doing so, the poem generates a mode of descriptive writing reliant on the generative distortion of its subject, ultimately positing an anti-mimetic program—one that lays bare the limitations and fictions of the cartographic—for the representation of space.

Allegory · Art · Embodied cognition · Epistemology · Immanence · Linguistics · Literature · Mode (computer interface) · Narrative · Poetry · Representation (politics) · Space (punctuation) · Subject (documents) · Subjectivity · Computer Science · Historical Studies of British Isles · History · Philippine History and Culture · Philosophy · Travel Writing and Literature