Reforming Empire: Protestant Colonialism and Conscience in British LiteratureUniversity of Missouri Press, 2002 - 290 sidor "The strength of Empire," wrote Ben Jonson, "is in religion." In Reforming Empire, Christopher Hodgkins takes Jonson's dictum as his point of departure, showing how for more than four centuries the Protestant imagination gave the British Empire its main paradigms for dominion and also, ironically, its chief languages of anti-imperial dissent. From Edmund Spenser's Faerie Queene to Rudyard Kipling's "The Man Who Would Be King," English literature about empire has turned with strange constancy to themes of worship and idolatry, atrocity and deliverance, slavery and service, conversion, prophecy, apostasy, and doom.
Focusing on the work of the Protestant imagination from the Renaissance origins of English overseas colonization through the modern end of England's colonial enterprise, Hodgkins organizes his study around three kinds of religious binding--unification, subjugation, and self-restraint. He shows how early modern Protestants like Hakluyt and Spenser reformed the Arthurian chronicles and claimed to inherit Rome's empire from the Caesars: how Ralegh and later Cromwell imagined a counterconquest of Spanish America, and how Milton's Satan came to resemble Cortés; how Drake and the fictional Crusoe established their status as worthy colonial masters by refusing to be worshiped as gods; and how seventeenth-century preachers, poets, and colonists moved haltingly toward a racist metaphysics--as Virginia began by celebrating the mixed marriage of Pocahontas but soon imposed the draconian separation of the Color Line.
Yet Hodgkins reveals that Tudor-Stuart times also saw the revival of Augustinian anti-expansionism and the genesis of Protestant imperial guilt. From the start, British Protestant colonialism contained its own opposite: a religion of self-restraint. Though this conscience often was co-opted or conscripted to legitimize conquests and pacify the conquered, it frequently found memorable and even fierce literary expression in writers such as Shakespeare, Daniel, Herbert, Swift, Johnson, Burke, Blake, Austen, Browning, Tennyson, Conrad, Forster, and finally the anti-Protestant Waugh. Written in a lively and accessible style, Reforming Empire will be of interest to all scholars and students of English literature.
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... play is set at a crossroads in British history : old Britain is both resisting and yielding to Roman discipline and dissipation , and the cosmic order is crossing a threshold at the time of Christ's birth . The play presents us with ...
... play on Imogen's trust and Posthumus's male honor , Iachimo represents how British simplicity can be played upon and overcome by intricate Latin finesse . On the imperial level , as we have already noted , Spenser voiced the common view ...
... play's betrayals of logic , and indeed its shaping prox- imity to early Stuart imperial politics , we need not grant its aesthetic failure . Most members of a Jacobean audience would have perceived these improbabilities as a higher kind ...
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Recovery from John Dee to Cymbeline | 10 |
Two The Uses of Atrocity | 54 |
Three Stooping to Conquer | 77 |
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Reforming Empire: Protestant Colonialism and Conscience in British Literature Christopher Hodgkins Begränsad förhandsgranskning - 2002 |
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