The Geography of Empire in English Literature, 1580-1745

Download or read book The Geography of Empire in English Literature, 1580-1745 written by Bruce McLeod and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1999-09-28 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.