Abstract
Critical readings of the English Renaissance have recently shown a marked increase in interest in the literary representation of foreign lands, an interest that can be traced in part to the influence of postcolonial criticism. Many of these readings have focused their attention on topics of nationhood, English responses to foreign cultures and geopolitical spaces, the emergence of expansionist dreams and ambitions, and the structures of early modern Orientalism.1 There is also especial attention paid to Ireland and the New World in the writing and conceptualizing of English nationhood, and for good reason—Ireland and the Americas constituted the primary “colonial” projects of Elizabethan and Stuart England.
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Notes
Representative studies on these topics that have emerged in recent years include David Loewenstein and Paul Stevens, eds., Early Modern Nationalism and Milton’s England (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008)
Balachandra Rajan and Elizabeth Sauer, eds., Imperialisms: Historical and Literary Investigations, 1500–1900 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004)
David J. Baker and Willy Maley, eds., British Identities and English Renaissance Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002)
Balachandra Rajan and Elizabeth Sauer, eds., Milton and the Imperial Vision (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1999)
Walter S. H. Lim, The Arts of Empire: The Poetics of Colonialism from Ralegh to Milton (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1998)
David J. Baker, Between Nations: Shakespeare, Spenser, Marvell, and the Question of Britain (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997)
Brendan Bradshaw, Andrew Had-field, and Willy Maley, eds., Representing Ireland: Literature and the Origins of Confict, 1534–1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993)
Richard Helgerson, Forms of Nationhood: The Elizabethan Writing of England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992)
Jeffrey Knapp, An Empire Nowhere: England, America, and Literature from “Utopia’ to “The Tempest” (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992).
Joan Pong Linton, The Romance of the New World: Gender and the Literary Formations of English Colonialism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 31, 56–57.
Jerry Brotton, Trading Territories: Mapping the Early Modern World (London: Reaktion Books, 1997), 167
Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage, 1978), 59–60.
See especially Nabil Matar, Islam in Britain, 1558–1685 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008)
Gerald MacLean, Looking East English Writing and the Ottoman Empire before 1800 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007)
Gerald MacLean, ed., Re-Orienting the Renaissance: Cultural Exchanges with the East (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005)
Matthew Birchwood and Matthew Dimmock, eds., Cultural Encounters between East and West (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2005)
Daniel Vitkus, Turning Turk: English Theater and the Multicultural Mediterranean, 1570–1630 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003)
8. Samuel Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996)
Edward W. Said, Reflections on Exile and Other Essays (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 571.
See Nabil Matar, Europe through Arab Eyes, 1578–1727 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008)
Nabil Matar, ed. and trans., In the Lands of the Christians: Arabic Travel Writing in the Seventeenth Century (New York: Routledge, 2003).
John Archer, Old Worlds: Egypt, Southwest Asia, India, and Russia in Early Modern English Writing (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001), 191.
Peter Heylyn, Cosmographie, ed. Robert Mayhew, 4 vols. (Bristol: Thoemmes Press, 2003)
See Bernadette Andrea, Women and Islam in Early Modern English Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).
One of the major objectives of the criticism that has come to be associated with the “New British Historiography” is to offset critical and historical studies perceived to be anglocentric in perspective. Writings of the Tudor “borderlands” are read in conjunction with English works to highlight the principle of cultural and political interactions at a time when the concept of Britain is far from unified and sustained. One of its central points is that when conventionally English texts are read within the context of “the British problem,” they lose their unity and are marked instead by fissures and instabilities that are identifiably ideological. Representative studies include Baker, Between Nations; Baker and Maley, eds., British Identities; and Andrew Murphy, But the Irish Sea Betwixt Us: Ireland, Colonialism, and Renaissance Literature (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1999.
See Daniel J. Vitkus, Three Turk Plays from Early Modern England (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000).
Ben Jonson, Epicoene or the Silent Woman, ed. Roger Holdsworth (New York: New Mermaids, 1979).
See, for example, Rachel Trubowitz, “’The People of Asia and with them the Jews’: Israel, Asia, and England in Milton’s Writings,” in Milton and the Jews, ed. Douglas A. Brooks (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 151–77.
Kim F. Hall, Things of Darkness: Economies of Race and Gender in Early Modern England (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995), 44–6.
Samuel Purchas, Virginias Verger: Or a Discourse shewing the benefits which may grow to this Kingdome from American-English Plantations, and especially those of Virginia and Summer Ilands, in Hakluytus Posthumus or Purchas His Pilgrimes: Contayning a History of the World in Sea Voyages and Lande Travells by Englishmen and Others, 20 vols. (Glasgow: James MacLehose and Sons, Publishers to the University, 1905–1907), 19:218–67.
David Armitage, The Ideological Origins of the British Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 81, 85.
Crystal Bartolovich, “’Baseless Fabric’: London as a ‘World City,’” in “The Tempest” and Its Travels, ed. Peter Hulme and William H. Sherman (London: Reaktion Books, 2000), 15.
Paul Stevens, “How Milton’s Nationalism Works: Globalization and the Possibilities of Positive Nationalism,” in Early Modern Nationalism, ed. Loewenstein and Stevens (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008), 279–80.
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© 2009 Debra Johanyak and Walter S. H. Lim
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Lim, W.S.H. (2009). Introduction: The English Renaissance, Orientalism, and the Idea of Asia—Framing the Issues. In: Johanyak, D., Lim, W.S.H. (eds) The English Renaissance, Orientalism, and the Idea of Asia. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230106222_1
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