The Geography of Empire in English Literature, 1580–1745

Between 1580 and 1745 - 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 materialized: a coherent, socio-spatial system known as an empire. Taking the Atlantic world as its context, this ambitious 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.

• Offers new perspective on empire and colonialism through its study of the cultural and historical geography of the transatlantic world • Gives a radical rereading of canonical works by Spenser, Milton, Defoe and others • Combines the study of literary texts with theories of space and its production

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 systematizing of the Yahoo; 7. Conclusion: the politics of space.