Scottish Colonial Literature: Writing the Atlantic, 1603-1707 - Paperback

by Kirsten Sandrock (Author)

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.

Back Jacket

Brings together previously dispersed sources to argue for a tradition of Scottish colonial writing before the Union of Parliaments 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. Kirsten Sandrock is Assistant Professor at the English Department at the University of Goettingen, Germany.

Author Biography

Kirsten Sandrock teaches at the department of British Literature and Cultural Studies at the University of Goettingen. She is currently guest professor of English Literature at Tuebingen University and previously taught at the Universities of Leipzig, Vienna, and Wuppertal. 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.