Table of Contents

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.

Promotional Information

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

Reviews

"Reading this fine book is a delight and an education. The prose is powerful and concise, the reading wide yet well digested, and the thesis as intelligent as it is adventuous." John Gillies, Modern Philology "...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