Full Description
The blank spots on a map and the legends that speak of terrae incognitae are among the most seductive sirens of the cartographic imagination. They hint at the existence of unknown lands, yet tell us nothing about what they are or what they might be like.
Do such lands even exist? How many types of terrae incognitae are there? What does it mean, and what has it meant, to mark a land as unknown? Why do so many maps of the last five centuries insist on reserving a place for unknown geographies?
This book navigates the cartographic unknown, exploring its contribution to the history of knowledge and geographical culture.
Contents
Acknowledgements
List of Illustration
Introduction: Geographies of the Unknown
1 Evasive Geographies: No Man's Land
2 Exploring the Nuances of the Unknown: the Limits of Dichotomies and the Diversity of Inaccessible Worlds
3 Is It Possible to Map the Unknown?
4 In Light of the Unknown: the Aesthetics of Absence
5 Structuring the Unknown
part 1
The Plausible
Introduction to Part 1
1 Plausible Geographies: the Expectation of New Worlds
1 White on White: Making Room on World Maps for Posing New Questions
2 A World of Islands and Continents
3 Discovering a World: the Quarta Pars or the Unexpected Continent
4 Dreaming of a World: the Quinta Pars or the Expected Continent
2 Topographies of Hypothesis, Ways of Writing Questions
1 Ellipsis: Interrupted Geographies Awaiting More Information
2 The Shapes of the Unknown: Geometry
3 Aditamento : the Unknown as Epilogue
3 Mirrors and Mirages
1 The Mirror as Device: from Mimesis to Distortion
2 The Southern Ocean as a mirror
3 On the Other Side of the Mirror: Plus ultra equinoctialem and the Cosmographical Imagination in Symmetric Key
4 Seas and Skies: a Play of Mirrors
5 Mirror-Toponyms
6 From Mirror to Mirage: From Plausible Illusion to Reinvented Fiction
part 2
The Poorly Explored: Nineteenth Century Patagonia
Introduction to Part 2
4 Emptying: Blank as an Omen of Exploration
1 Terra incognita or nondum plenum cognita: From the Unknown to the Little-Known, the Genesis of a Transformation
2 Preparing Space: from White to Blank
3 Deletion: Blank as a Deliberate Act
4 Blank as Moment Zero
5 Conquering the Realms of the Foreign
1 Patagonia's Foreignness
2 A Desert "That is Good for Nothing"
3 Toward the Positivity of the Desert: the Unutterable Becomes the Unuttered
6 Ultimatum to the Unknown: the Banishment of the Blank
1 Tamed Deserts: the Cartographic Rhetoric that Turned Patagonia into Provinces
2 Putting the Blank on the Other Side: Transforming the Blank into the Foreign
part 3
The Non-Visible: the Landscape of the Abyss at the Bottom of the Oceans
Introduction to Part 3
7 Shelters from the Fearful Unknown: Islands amid the Darkness
1 The Insular Drive: a Hinge between the Inside and the Outside
2 Leaving the Islands to Venture into the Endless Blue
3 Blank Oceans, Full Oceans
8 The Naked Ocean: the Spectacle of the Non-Visible
1 The Image as a Device for Viewing the Unseen: the Power of Abstraction
2 Seeing the World in Miniature
3 Mapping the Non-Visible: Creating the Impossible Landscape
4 The Nude Ocean or the Curtains of the World Theater
9 Beyond the Shadows: Going Down to the Bottom (to Reach the Illusion of Seeing)
1 The Darkness of the Colourless and the Deep: from Gloom to Truth
2 Bringing the Bottom to the Surface: Bathymetric Marks
3 Measuring to See: the Geometric Gaze
Conclusion: the Unknown, Inaccessible Geographies
1 Blank and White Geographies
2 Terrae incognitae: the Positivity of a Negativity
3 Beyond the Cases: the Languages and Categories of the Unknown, the Flexibility of the Unchanging
Bibliography
Index
