While Chapters 1–3 examine early modern texts that take the work of spatial representation as an opportunity to consider the labor, dangers, and possibilities of representation, the Conclusion (which takes its title from remarks by Richard Hakluyt in describing how as a child he became fascinated by maps) considers three contemporary objects: a mug, a Mapparium, and recent revisions to the famous boot-shaped silhouette of Louisiana. Each of these objects represents a global or regional area in some novel way: foregrounding their artifice in order to exploit the same cartographic anxieties of representation articulated in works by Spenser, Drayton, and Milton, these objects suggest that the contemporary moment’s efforts to reimagine the space of the world in rhetorically affecting if overtly non-mimetic ways reflects the triumph of an early modern poetics of anxiety, a poetics that might be generative still, in the Anthropocene.
