The Geography of Empire in English Literature, 1580–1745
Format:Paperback
Publisher:Cambridge University Press
Published:15th Oct '09
Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back
This 1999 book is an ambitious exploration of the adventure and geography of empire in the works of English writers.
This ambitious 1999 book argues that England's seventeenth- and eighteenth-century culture was saturated by the experiences of colonialism. Using theories of space to ground his readings, Bruce McLeod skilfully explores how Spenser, Milton, Aphra Behn, Mary Rowlandson, Defoe and Swift imagine, interrogate and narrate the adventure and geography of empire.Between 1580 and 1745, a period that saw Edmund Spenser's journey to an unconquered Ireland and the Jacobite Rebellion, the first British Empire was established. The intervening years saw the cultural and material forces of colonialism pursue a fitful, often fanciful endeavour to secure space for this expansion. With the defeat of the Highland clans, what England in 1580 could only dream about had materialised: a coherent, socio-spatial system known as an empire. Taking the Atlantic world as its context, this ambitious 1999 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 skilfully explores how works by Edmund Spenser, John Milton, Aphra Behn, Mary Rowlandson, Daniel Defoe and Jonathan Swift imagine, interrogate and narrate the adventure and geography of empire.
"Reading this fine book is a delight and an education. The prose is powerful and concise, the reading wide yet well digested, and the thesis as intelligent as it is adventuous." John Gillies, Modern Philology
"...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
ISBN: 9780521121392
Dimensions: 229mm x 152mm x 17mm
Weight: 450g
300 pages