Reforming Empire: Protestant Colonialism and Conscience in British LiteratureUniversity of Missouri Press, 2002 - 304 páginas ""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 Cortes; 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 |
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Página 10
... Arthur . . . doe force me with a certaine sorowful reverence, here to celebrate thy memorie. —John Dee, in Richard Hakluyt, Principal Navigations, 1.18 Renowmed kings, and sacred Emperours, Thy fruitfull Offspring, shall from thee ...
... Arthur . . . doe force me with a certaine sorowful reverence, here to celebrate thy memorie. —John Dee, in Richard Hakluyt, Principal Navigations, 1.18 Renowmed kings, and sacred Emperours, Thy fruitfull Offspring, shall from thee ...
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... Arthur's Glastonbury “tomb.” In both cases, what had been might be again; the departed empire, which treachery had divided and ruined, might be celebrated and restored by regenerative mourning. Such acts of “memorie,” whether “re ...
... Arthur's Glastonbury “tomb.” In both cases, what had been might be again; the departed empire, which treachery had divided and ruined, might be celebrated and restored by regenerative mourning. Such acts of “memorie,” whether “re ...
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... Arthur's descendant and a British empress, and for her to read in the 1590s of Spenser's Britomart and her seer's glass and of Merlin's mirror. And what did it mean for the Scottish King James VI to ascend the English throne in 1604 and ...
... Arthur's descendant and a British empress, and for her to read in the 1590s of Spenser's Britomart and her seer's glass and of Merlin's mirror. And what did it mean for the Scottish King James VI to ascend the English throne in 1604 and ...
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... Arthur, King of Britain, or indeed for the Matter of Britain in general. Indeed, the initial wave of reform made Arthur the target of violent iconoclasm: his Glastonbury Abbey “tomb,” a shrine since 1278, was destroyed in the ...
... Arthur, King of Britain, or indeed for the Matter of Britain in general. Indeed, the initial wave of reform made Arthur the target of violent iconoclasm: his Glastonbury Abbey “tomb,” a shrine since 1278, was destroyed in the ...
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... Arthur's transatlantic empire, whichsupposedly had stretched, on the eve of Mordred's rebellion, from Greenland to the gates of Rome.8 These claims, which Dee advanced in his General and Rare Memorials, Hakluyt then pressed insistently ...
... Arthur's transatlantic empire, whichsupposedly had stretched, on the eve of Mordred's rebellion, from Greenland to the gates of Rome.8 These claims, which Dee advanced in his General and Rare Memorials, Hakluyt then pressed insistently ...
Índice
10 | |
Two The Uses of Atrocity | 54 |
Three Stooping to Conquer | 77 |
Four The Nubile Savage and the Soulless Slave | 113 |
Five Prophets against Empire | 137 |
Six Hollow All Delight | 191 |
Moravians in the Moon | 241 |
Index | 267 |
Otras ediciones - Ver todo
Reforming Empire: Protestant Colonialism and Conscience in British Literature Christopher Hodgkins Vista previa restringida - 2002 |
Reforming Empire: Protestant Colonialism and Conscience in British Literature Christopher Hodgkins Vista de fragmentos - 2002 |
Términos y frases comunes
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