Description:
This book focuses on three undertakings at Nova Scotia (1620s), East New Jersey (1680s) and the Isthmus of Panama, then known as Darien (1690s). Analysing works written in the larger context of the Scottish Atlantic, it examines how the Atlantic influenced seventeenth-century Scottish literature and vice versa. The relationship between art and ideology is key to the author's discussion as Sandrock argues early modern writing employed utopianism as a tool for empire-building and as a means of claiming power over the Atlantic.
Brief description: Kirsten Sandrock is Chair of English Literature and Cultural Studies at the University of Würzburg. Her research ranges from the early modern literature and culture to contemporary Anglophone studies, and she has published widely on intercultural encounters, colonial and postcolonial studies, Shakespeare, travel writing, gender and genre studies. She is the author of Scottish Colonial Literature: Writing the Atlantic, 1603-1707 (Edinburgh University Press, 2021), co-editor of Locating Italy: East and West in British-Italian Transactions (2013) and of the Shakespeare Seminar Online.
Review Quotes: Scottish Colonial Literature: Writing the Atlantic, 1603-1707 sheds new light on the Scottish literature and culture of the long seventeenth century in the context of the Scottish Atlantic, deftly examining the relationship between colonialism and utopianism in early modern Scottish colonial projects in Nova Scotia, East New Jersey and Darien.-- "Leith Davis, Simon Fraser University"