This book, original in emphasis, daring in execution, maps out the shaping power of English Renaissance literature in creating and contesting national and colonial identities through the work of major canonical authors including Shakespeare, Spenser and Milton. Informed throughout by the burgeoning fields of the new British history and postcolonial criticism, this volume marks a dramatic shift in studies of the early modern period, from Irish to British concerns, thus accounting for the interplay of union, plantation, and conquest.

This student edition is based on the first published text and offers an authoritative introduction, discussing the View's reception, relating it to Spenser's corpus as a whole, and summarising recent scholarship.

Shakespeare and Scotland is a timely collection of new essays in which leading scholars on both sides of the Atlantic address a neglected national context for an exemplary body of dramatic work too often viewed within a narrow English milieu or against a broad British backdrop.
These essays explore, from a variety of critical perspectives, the playwright's place in Scotland and the place of Scotland in his work. From critical reception to dramatic and cinematic adaptation, the contributors engage with the complexity of Shakespeare's Scotland and Scotland's Shakespeare. The influence of...

Salvaging Spenser is a major new work of literary revision which places Edmund Spenser's corpus, from The Shepheardes Calender to A View of the Present State of Ireland, within an elaborate cultural and political context. The author refuses to engage in the sterile opposition between apology and attack that has marred studies of Spenser and Ireland, seeking neither to savage nor to save, but rather, in a project of critical recovery, to salvage Spenser from the wreckage of Irish history.

Though British history and identity in the early modern period are intensively researched areas, the role of literature in the construction of "Britishness" has not been thoroughly studied. In this volume, leading Renaissance literary critics review a broad range of texts from the period, including plays of Shakespeare, in view of the new British history. This collection opens up a new kind of literary history with immediate relevance to contemporary discussions of "Britishness."

While a number of published works approach the shared concerns of Ireland and Scotland, no major volume has offered a sustained and up-to-date analysis of the cultural connections between the two, despite the fact that these border crossings continue to be politically suggestive. The current collection addresses this area of comparative critical neglect, focusing on writers, from Charles Robert Maturin to Liam McIlvanney, whose work offers insights into debates about identity and politics in these two neighbour nations, too often overwhelmed by connections with their larger neighbour,...

Attempts to map out in detail all of the known facts concerning the poet Edmund Spenser, a major canonical author whose entire literary career was spent in Ireland. The book charts Spenser's parallel vocations of Elizabethan planter and Renaissance writer

Post-colonial theory is a relatively new area in critical contemporary studies, having its foundations more Postcolonial Criticism brings together some of the most important critical writings in the field, and aims to present a clear overview of, and introduction to, one of the most exciting and rapidly developing areas of contemporary literary criticism. It charts the development of the field both historically and conceptually, from its beginnings in the early post-war period to the present day.

The first phase of postcolonial criticism is recorded here in the pioneering work of thinkers...