This book convincingly challenges both the extremely short historical memoryof most postcolonial work and the alltooinsularly English world stillconjured by per... » 

This book convincingly challenges both the extremely short historical memoryof most postcolonial work and the alltooinsularly English world stillconjured by period specialists. Hogarthian whores and Grub Street hacks coffeehouses and fashionable pastimes and the burgeoning of print culture all standrevealed as intimately bound to portents of plantation insurgency agitationfor abolition and the vast fortunes produced by the labouring bodies of thepoor the colonized and the enslaved. Eighteenthcentury studies has neverappeared in a more engaged and fascinating light.Professor Donna LandryUniversity of KentIn this volume Suvir Kaul addresses the relations betweenliterary culture English commercial and colonial expansion and the making ofGreat Britain in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. He arguesthat literary writing played a crucial role in generating the vocabulary ofBritish nationalism both in international terms and in attempts to realignpolitical and cultural relations between England Scotland and Ireland. Theformal innovations and practices characteristic of eighteenthcentury Englishliterature were often responses to the worlds brought into view by travelwriters merchants and colonists. Writers even those suspicious of mercantileand colonial expansion worked with a growing sense of a national literaturewhose achievements would provide the cultural capital adequate to globalimperial power and would distinguish Great Britain for its twin success inarms and arts. The book ranges from Davenants theatre to Smollets RoderickRandom to Phillis Wheatleys poetry to trace the impact of empire on literarycreativity.Key FeaturesAn introduction to the impact of mercantilism andempire on the crafting of eighteenthcentury British literatureEncouragesstudents to examine the key formal innovations that define eighteenthcenturyBritish literary history as they were produced by writers who redefined theirsense of home nation and the world «