The Island Garden

"Lynn Staley's The Island Garden: England's Language of Nation from Gildas to Marvell is a capacious, erudite, ruminative, recursive work that explores the complex web of discourses that composed the identity and history of England. Staley shows us the ways in which writers formed a range of images for England as they engaged with different political contexts. Hers is not a unilinear, teleological history; rather, we encounter a patient display of continuity in the resources of historical imagination from medieval to early modern." —David Aers, Duke University

"Lynn Staley's work just keeps getting better and better, more penetrating and incisive. Her study of English identity, The Island Garden, is richly nuanced and traverses an unusually wide range of texts, down to the seventeenth century. Staley nimbly deploys, analyzes, and distinguishes a rich variety of discourses and their various manipulations, and remains constantly alert to their often surprising variations." —Ralph Hanna, Keble College, Oxford

"The Island Garden: England’s Language of Nation from Gildas to Marvell dazzles with its sweep, reach, learning, and confident grounding in medieval and early modern texts and historiography. Lynn Staley here takes on nothing less than the way that English space, place, and identity over more than a millennium was shaped by the language of enclosure—by the monastic or country house, the croft, the sceptered isle, the Edenic green garden in a silver sea that was an England both chaste and beautiful as Susanna and also vulnerable to invasion, seizure, and the sluice gate." —Gail McMurray Gibson, Davidson College

"Staley explores the metaphor of the island garden as it pertains to England's continual search for (and understanding of) its own sense of national identity. A thread that runs through this is the sense of enclosure that permeates the texts that form the basis of the book. . . . Staley's book is both extremely straightforward in its argument and wide-ranging in its literary, cultural, and historical scope. The end result is a wholly satisfying scholarly endeavor." —Choice

". . . it is good to have Lynn Staley's study, which charts how the nation was conceived and imagined and reminds us of this long history. For Staley the conception of Britain as an island garden was not an imagined identity but a 'trope with a set of available ideas or anxieties' principally about safety and isolation. . . . The Island Garden is an impressively conceived and substantial book. . . " —Times Literary Supplement

“Lynn Staley has produced a thorough and expansive survey of the language of England’s self-definition, that is, the idiom of enclosure: the island enclosed by the sea, the garden enclosed by its wall, the bride enclosed by her chastity, the nation protected by kings or ecclesiastical foundations. . . . The Island Garden . . . will prove a valuable resource for a variety of scholars and should feature in a number of conversations about England and its cultural and national identity.” —Sixteenth Century Journal

“Lynn Staley’s The Island Garden goes back further and digs deeper than any previous intervention into the debate on the origins and development of English/British national identity. The three key planks of her study are the medieval/early modern ‘divide,’ the ideation of England as a place, and the history of England’s histories.” —Modern Philology

“Her book provides a compelling new intervention in the critical discussion of nation animating medieval studies for the last twenty years. . . . Like the image to which it attends, Staley’s book is a garden from which many new studies might grow as we continue to contemplate the insular English nation.” —Journal of English and Germanic Philology