Renaissance Literatures and Postcolonial Studies

Treating the Renaissance as also the period that saw the birth of European colonialism, this book focuses on the interplay between the discovery of new lands and the re-discovery of old texts. It describes the parallel emergence of colonialism and its critique, and traces the persistence of a dynamic relationship between the colonial and the postcolonial in contemporary literary criticism. In surveying a range of early modern texts and contemporary critical debates surrounding them, it insists upon diversity and difference, attending to the multiple origins and trajectories that characterize both the colonial and the postcolonial. Its detailed case studies of canonical and non-canonical texts, drawn from a variety of genres, offer careful reconstructions of key contexts - such as court versus mercantile culture or intra-European rivalry - and central issues, such as ethnicity, class and gender and the ideological uses of the past. Throughout, the book stresses the complex place of literature and literary form in negotiating historical ruptures in the past and the present. Key Features* Provides an overview of theories of colonialism and postcolonialism, with particular emphasis on their application to Renaissance literature* Discusses a range of European literatures that reflect and shape the processes of imperial expansion and colonization* Contextualizes canonical works by such authors as Shakespeare and Milton in terms both of early modern discourses of colonialism and from contemporary postcolonial perspectives* Offers cogent introductions to central debates and interventions in colonial and postcolonial studies that have emerged from and shaped our understanding of Renaissance literature