Ayesha Ramachandran tells a new story about a familiar phenomenon: how "the world" as a cultural key word was reimagined in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Before "the world" in its totality as seen from the Moon became an undisputed fact, how did European philosophers, scientists, mapmakers, and writers imagine an all-encompassing global vision in the wake of their encounter with the New World. "The Worldmakers" moves beyond histories of globalization to explore how "the world" itself--variously understood as an ...
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Ayesha Ramachandran tells a new story about a familiar phenomenon: how "the world" as a cultural key word was reimagined in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Before "the world" in its totality as seen from the Moon became an undisputed fact, how did European philosophers, scientists, mapmakers, and writers imagine an all-encompassing global vision in the wake of their encounter with the New World. "The Worldmakers" moves beyond histories of globalization to explore how "the world" itself--variously understood as an object of inquiry, a comprehensive category, and a system of order--was self-consciously shaped by human makers through rhetoric, aesthetics, "poiesis," and the speculative imagination. Gathering a diverse cast of characters, from Dutch cartographers and French philosophers to and Portuguese and English poets, Ramachandran describes a literary and visual history of "firsts" the first world atlas, the first modern essay, the first global epic, and the first modern attempt to develop a systematic natural philosophy--all this in an effort by early modern thinkers to capture "the world" on the page. It will be read eagerly by students of comparative early modern European literature, history and philosophy of science, and cartographic and intellectual history.
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