Reforming empire : Protestant colonialism and conscience in British literature / Christopher Hodgkins.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Hodgkins, Christopher, 1958-

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

English literature--Protestant authors--History and criticism.

English literature.

Imperialism in literature.

Protestantism and literature.

Conscience in literature.

Colonies in literature.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (304 p.)

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Columbia : University of Missouri Press, c2002.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

"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.

Contents:

Machine generated contents note: Introduction: Binding Ties 1

One. Once-and-Future Kings

The "Matter of Britain" and Protestant Imperial Recovery from John Dee to Cymbeline 10

Two. The Uses of Atrocity

Satanic Spaniards, Hispanic Satans, and the "Black Legend" from Las Casas to Milton 54

Three. Stooping to Conquer

Heathen Idolatry, Protestant Humility, and the "White Legend" of Drake 77

Four. The Nubile Savage and the Soulless Slave

Imagining Race from Pocahontas to the Colonial Color Line 113

Five. Prophets against Empire

Countertraditions, 1516-1815 137

Six. "Hollow All Delight!"

Countertraditions, 1815-1945 191.

Notes:

Bibliographic Level Mode of Issuance: Monograph

Includes bibliographical references (p. 249-265) and index.

ISBN:

0-8262-6294-5

OCLC:

55663992