Afterword: Mapping Early Modern Womens Literary History
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One way of conceptualizing English literary history done in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was to imagine the past as being a landscape that could be mapped using distinctive landmarks, like a modern tourist map, indicating scenic spots not to be missed. Samuel Taylor Coleridge inBiographia Literariafamously placed Shakespeare and Milton occupying the poetic mountaintop of Parnassus, the two glory-smitten summits of the poetic mountain. The organization of literary historical narratives around individual great writers lent itself well to such spatial conceptions of literary landscapes, with prominent writers occupying the high places and lesser ones dwelling on