JOHN KERRIGAN, Archipelagic English: Literature, History and Politics 1603-1707.

Abstract

ONE suspects that some readers may view this book as, at least in part, a politically partisan work designed to promote Celtic nationalism. And indeed, on one level such an impression would be understandable. Though the author claims it is ‘not a manual for devolutionary politicians’ (87), it seems at least tacitly, and in places explicitly, sympathetic with the respective nationalist agendas in Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland. Evidence for this is signalled, for example, in the author's stated aim to ‘strip away modern Anglocentric and Victorian imperial paradigms’ (2), and in his consistently employing terminology sceptical or hostile to the union—‘the so-called British Isles’ (21). And perhaps at times, particularly in relation to recent history, Kerrigan can frame his analysis within uncharacteristically narrow parameters: the resurgence of Irish, Welsh, and Scottish nationalism in the 1980s, for instance, takes place ‘against a background of harsh and assertively English Thatcherite government from Whitehall’ (22), with no further evidence or context offered.