The Geography of Empire in English Literature, 1580-1745

ISBN-13: 9780521660792 / Angielski / Twarda / 1999 / 298 str.

Bruce McLeod

Opis

Between 1580 and 1745--Edmund Spenser's journey to an unconquered Ireland and the Jacobite Rebellion--the first British Empire was established. This ambitious book argues that England's culture during the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries was saturated with a geographic imagination fed by the experiences and experiments of colonialism. Using theories of space and its production to ground his readings, Bruce McLeod skillfully explores how works by Spenser, Milton, Aphra Behn, Mary Rowlandson, Daniel Defoe and Jonathan Swift imagine, interrogate and narrate the adventure and geography of empire.

Recenzje

"...McLeod's wide-ranging (at times loosely) and learned book details the spatial politics embedded in late sixteenth-, seventeenth-, and early eighteenth-century literary texts...McLeod attends to both the cultural and the material work of English/British identity formation." Spenser Newsletter

Spis treści

1. Introduction: productions of Empire; 2. Thinking territorially: Spenser, Ireland, and the English nation-state; 3. Contracting geography from the country house to the Colony; 4. Overseeing paradise: Milton, Behn, and Rowlandson; 5. The import and export of Colonial Space: the islands of Defoe and Swift; 6. 1745 and the systematising of the Yahoo; 7. Conclusion: the politics of space.