Military Illustration, Garden Design, and Marvell's "Upon Appleton House."

This essay isolates formal and generic characteristics of illustrations from manuals of military strategy and tactics and of gardening design and uses them to analyze Andrew Marvell's poem, "Upon Appleton House, To My Lord Fairfax" (1681). It argues that the principal features of the poem-the stagin...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:English Literary Renaissance Vol. 41; no. 1; pp. 146 - 189
Main Author: Acheson, Katherine O.
Format: Essay
Published: University of Chicago Press Winter2011
Subjects:
Online Access:View this record in EBSCOhost
Description
Summary:This essay isolates formal and generic characteristics of illustrations from manuals of military strategy and tactics and of gardening design and uses them to analyze Andrew Marvell's poem, "Upon Appleton House, To My Lord Fairfax" (1681). It argues that the principal features of the poem-the staging of visual effects, the integration of military and horticultural imagery, and the subjectivity attributed to Maria Fairfax-are products of the conceptualization of territory or "dominion" the diagrams exemplify. In addition to offering a novel interpretation of "Upon Appleton House," the essay offers more broadly applicable insights into the relationships between space, land, and militarism in seventeenth-century England, and demonstrates how diagrammatic representation can be used as evidence in discussions of early modern literary and cultural phenomena.