This thesis contributes to critical discussions of the changes wrought by developing print technologies on the literary cultures of England in the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. It adds to these discussions by attending specifically to the ways in which the figurative content of texts was altered by the technology of printing. The thesis argues that certain texts describe the people, places, and processes of printing in ways that can be characterised as developing and engaging a typographic imaginary. The typographic imaginary is posited as a literary phenomenon shared by different writers, a wider cultural understanding of printing, and a means to conceptualize and describe the imaginative otherness that printing introduced to literature. It is suggested that over the course of the sixteenth century printing develops a powerful figurative authority with varied, but recognizable, characteristics. Alongside discussion of early printers' manuals, the thesis particularly addresses works by William Caxton, Robert Copland, William Baldwin, Edmund Spenser and Thomas Nashe. This study proposes that the ways in which printing is figured by these authors constitute a lineage that foreshadows the representation of printing in later works, including Alexander Pope's The Dunciad.