Abstract
In a provocative essay contributed to the first volume of The Oxford History of the British Empire, David Armitage questioned a well-established account of the relationship between literature and empire in the early modern period. According to this view, English literature in the later sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries emerges as a consequence of empire, both dependent upon and essentially supportive of the efforts of exploration and settlement that marked the age. Armitage identifies this critical orthodoxy as prevailing not only among postcolonial opponents of empire, but also, in a curious convergence, among earlier historians of literature who welcomed the fraught but successful efforts of mariners and colonists to establish an English presence in the New World; the ‘facts’ were not in dispute, even if their interpretation remained subject to controversy (Armitage 1998).
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© 2011 Daniel Carey
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Carey, D. (2011). Spenser, Purchas, and the Poetics of Colonial Settlement*. In: Bateman, F., Pilkington, L. (eds) Studies in Settler Colonialism. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230306288_3
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