An Empire Nowhere: England, America, and Literature from Utopia to the Tempest

What caused England's literary renaissance? One answer has been such unprecedented developments as the European discovery of America. Yet England in the sixteenth century was far from an expanding nation. Not only did the Tudors lose England's sole remaining possessions on the Continent and, thanks to the Reformation, grow spiritually divided from the Continent as well, but every one of their attempts to colonize the New World actually failed. Jeffrey Knapp accounts for this strange combination of literary expansion and national isolation by showing how the English made a virtue of their increasing insularity. Ranging across a wide array of literary and extraliterary sources, Knapp argues that English poets rejected the worldly acquisitiveness of an empire like Spain's and took pride in England's material limitations as a sign of its spiritual strength. In the imaginary worlds of such fictions asUtopia,The Faerie Queene, andThe Tempest, they sought a grander empire, founded on the "otherworldly" virtues of both England and poetry itself.Knapp, Jeffrey is the author of 'An Empire Nowhere: England, America, and Literature from Utopia to the Tempest' with ISBN 9780520073623 and ISBN 0520073622.