England's insular imagining : the Elizabethan erasure of Scotland / Lorna Hutson.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Hutson, Lorna, author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

National characteristics, English, in literature.

English literature--Early modern, 1500-1700--History and criticism.

English literature.

National characteristics, Scottish, in literature.

Scottish literature--To 1700--History and criticism.

Scottish literature.

England--In literature.

England.

Scotland--History--Mary Stuart, 1542-1567--Historiography.

Scotland.

Great Britain--History--Tudors, 1485-1603--Historiography.

Great Britain.

Scotland--In literature.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (xii, 323 pages) : digital, PDF file(s).

Place of Publication:

Cambridge, United Kingdom ; New York, NY : Cambridge University Press, 2023.

Summary:

How have the English conceived of Scotland? Lorna Hutson's book is an essential intervention in the contested narrative of British nationhood. It argues that England deployed a mythical 'British History' in pursuing dominion over its northern neighbour: initially through waging war, and then striving to make the very idea of Scotland vanish in new figurations of sea-sovereignty. The author explores English attempts at conquest in the 1540s, revealing how justifications of overlordship mutated into literary, legal and cartographic ploys to erase Scotland-as-kingdom. Maps, treatises and military propaganda are no less imaginative in their eradicative strategies than river poetry, chorography, allegory, epic, tragedies, history plays and masques. Hutson shows how Spenser's Faerie Queene, Shakespeare's Henry V and King Lear, Plowden's theory of the King's Two Bodies, Camden's Britannia, and the race-making in Jonson's Masque of Blackness are all implicated in England's jurisdictional claim and refusal to acknowledge Scotland as sovereign nation.

Contents:

Writing the forgotten war I: Henry's War, 1542-7

Writing the forgotten war II: Somerset's War, 1547-1550

How England became an island : The Faerie Queene

Scotland sui juris? : Scottish literature and the Marian constitutional crisis, 1567-73

On the knees of the body politic : Scottish succession and English liberties, 1567-1608

Scotland un-kingdomed : English history on stage

Race-making in the invention of Britain: The masque of blackness

Divisions and kingdoms : Oedipal Britain from Gorboduc to King Lear

Coda : Macbeth: 'alas, poor country'.

Notes:

Title from publisher's bibliographic system (viewed on 28 Sep 2023).

Other Format:

Print version:

ISBN:

9781009253598 (ebook)

Access Restriction:

Restricted for use by site license.