Future History: Global Fantasies in Seventeenth-Century American and British Writings

ISBN-13: 9780190665135 / Angielski / Twarda / 2017 / 248 str.

Kristina Bross

Opis

Future History traces the ways that English and American writers oriented themselves along an East-West axis to fantasize their place in the world. The book builds on new transoceanic scholarship and recent calls to approach early American studies from a global perspective. Such scholarship has largely focused on the early national period; Bross's work begins earlier and considers the intertwined identities of America, other English colonial sites and metropolitan England during a period before nation-state identities were hardened into the forms we know them today, when an English empire was nascent, not realized, and when a global perspective such as we might recognize it was just coming into focus for early modern Europeans. The author examines works that imagine England on a global stage in the Americas and East Indies just as--and in some cases even before--England occupied such spaces in force. Future History considers works written from the 1620s to the 1670s, but the center of gravity of Future History is writing at the mid-century, that is, writings coincident with the Interregnum, a time when England plotted and launched ambitious, often violent schemes to conquer, colonize or otherwise appropriate other lands, driven by both mercantile and religious desires.

Recenzje

Bross's Future History brings a much-needed and eye-opening global global perspective to the study of seventeenth-century English writing, reminding us that America and Asia alike were part of a proto-imperial English vision whose imagined future rested on present violence. This book will change the way scholars across disciplines understand early modern archives and spaces.

O autorze

Kristina Bross is an Associate Professor of English at Purdue University and the author of Dry Bones and Indian Sermons: Praying Indians in Colonial America (Cornell UP, 2004).