The Geography of Empire in English Literature, 1580–1745

This 1999 book is an ambitious exploration of the adventure and geography of empire in the works of English writers.

Bruce McLeod (Author)

9780521660792, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 28 September 1999

298 pages
22.9 x 15.2 x 2.1 cm, 0.61 kg

"...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

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.

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.

Subject Areas: Literary studies: c 1500 to c 1800 [DSBD]