Archipelagic identities

This collection looks at how national, regional and linguistic identities were formed and how they shaped one another in the writing of early modern Britain and Ireland. Its contributors include prominent scholars of British studies, and several essays revisit familiar figures such as Edmund Spenser and his experience in Ireland.

Alongside these well-known cases, the book turns to writers and works that receive less attention: Anne Dowriche's The French Historie, William Browne's Britannia Pastorals, William Richards' Wallography, and Anne Bradstreet's 'Dialogue between Old England and New'. It also considers the verse of Gaelic bards and the writing of French Huguenot refugees.

The volume gives particular weight to gender, class and migration as shapers of identity, areas that have seldom been studied in depth within this field. In doing so, it brings British studies into the wider field of contemporary literary criticism.