Reforming Empire: Protestant Colonialism and Conscience in British Literature""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 |
From inside the book
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Page ix
... centuries , the British lived with a fearful tension between their professed metaphysical modesty and their frequent colonial expansionism . This 1985 conception began a long gestation . Marriage and chil- dren , a doctoral dissertation ...
... centuries , the British lived with a fearful tension between their professed metaphysical modesty and their frequent colonial expansionism . This 1985 conception began a long gestation . Marriage and chil- dren , a doctoral dissertation ...
Page x
... century”; Donald Darnell and Kelley Griffith in earlier American; SallyAnn Ferguson in African American; Marilyn May Lombardi in romantic; Randolph Bulgin and Mary Ellis Gibson in Victorian; Robert Langenfeld, Keith Cushman, and Gail ...
... century”; Donald Darnell and Kelley Griffith in earlier American; SallyAnn Ferguson in African American; Marilyn May Lombardi in romantic; Randolph Bulgin and Mary Ellis Gibson in Victorian; Robert Langenfeld, Keith Cushman, and Gail ...
Page 2
... centuries , the strength of the British Empire — and also its weakness — was in religion ; specifically in the Protestant imagination that gave the empire its main paradigms for dominion and possession but also , para- doxically , its ...
... centuries , the strength of the British Empire — and also its weakness — was in religion ; specifically in the Protestant imagination that gave the empire its main paradigms for dominion and possession but also , para- doxically , its ...
Page 5
... century authors thought through a whole range of vital concerns, certainly this must be true for the origins of empire as well.9 If this book modifies the methodology of some colonial and postcolonial stud- ies, it modifies the ...
... century authors thought through a whole range of vital concerns, certainly this must be true for the origins of empire as well.9 If this book modifies the methodology of some colonial and postcolonial stud- ies, it modifies the ...
Page 6
... century . " 12 Indeed , most influential literary studies of that later empire — particularly Martin Green's Dreams of Adventure , Deeds of Empire , Patrick Brantlinger's Rule of Darkness , Lewis Wurgaft's The Imperial Imagination , and ...
... century . " 12 Indeed , most influential literary studies of that later empire — particularly Martin Green's Dreams of Adventure , Deeds of Empire , Patrick Brantlinger's Rule of Darkness , Lewis Wurgaft's The Imperial Imagination , and ...
Contents
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 |
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Common terms and phrases
American anti-imperial Artegall Arthur Arthurian Aziz Black Legend Blake blood Britain British Empire British imperial Burke C. S. Lewis Caliban called Casas century chapter Christian humanist chronicle civility claim colonial conquered conquest Conrad Cortés countertradition cultural Cymbeline Dee's divine E. M. Forster early Elizabethan England English Protestant epic Evelyn Waugh expansionist Faerie Queene Ferrar further citations Geoffrey Hakluyt Heart of Darkness Henry History Houyhnhnm Howards End human Ibid imperial imagination imperialist Indian island John Dee King kingdom land literary London Lord Matter of Britain Milton modern moral myth native Paradise parenthetically Pocahontas poem political possession Prince Principal Navigations Protestant imperial Purchas Ralegh Reformation religion religious restored revival Richard Robert Rolfe Roman Samuel Johnson Satan savage Shakespeare Significantly Sir Francis Drake Sir Thomas slave Spain Spaniards Spanish Spenser spiritual Swift Tennyson translatio imperii Tudor University Press Victorian Virginia voyage Waugh William worship writes Yahoo