The Romance of the New World
Gender and the Literary Formations of English Colonialism

This book studies the lively interplay between popular romances and colonial narratives during a crucial period of English and colonial history.

Joan Pong Linton (Author)

9780521594547, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 28 November 1998

284 pages
22.9 x 15.2 x 1.9 cm, 0.59 kg

'The most impressive aspect of this book is the depth of Linton's engagement with the historical materials. She also deserves a great deal of credit for bringing our attention to long neglected figures such as William Warner … Linton's use of primary historical sources is dizzyingly extensive in certain parts of this book, and her ability to see analogies and relationships between fiction and her historical sources is nothing short of brilliant.' Kritikon Litterarum

This book studies the lively interplay between popular romances and colonial narratives during a crucial period when the values of a redefined patriarchy converged with the motives of an expansionist economy. Joan Pong Linton argues that the emergent romance figure of the husband (subsuming the roles of soldier and merchant) embodies the ideal of productive masculinity with which Englishmen defined their identity in America, justifying their activities of piracy, trade and settlement. At the same time, colonial narratives, in putting this masculinity to the test, often contradict and raise doubts about the ideal, and these doubts prompt individual romances to a self-conscious reflection on English cultural assumptions and colonial motives. Hence colonial experience reveals not just the 'romance of empire' but also the impact of the New World on English identity.

Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. Love's laborers: the busy heroes of romance and empire
2. Sea-knights and royal virgins: American gold and its discontents in lodge's A Margarite of America (1596)
3. Jack of Newbery and Drake in California: domestic and colonial narratives of English cloth and manhood
4. Eros and science: the discourses of magical consumerism
5. Gender, savagery, tobacco: marketplaces for consumption
6. Inconstancy: coming to Indians through Troilus and Cressida
7. The Tempest, 'rape', the art and smart of Virginian husbandry
Coda: the masks of Pocahontas
Notes
Works cited
Index.

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