The Geography of Empire in English Literature, 1580–1745 by Bruce McLeod

Abstract

69 imagination that ‘‘is not opposed or subsequent to truth, but synonymous with its vigorous pursuit.’’Akensidesuggeststhat a ‘‘prospect’’ one views with pleasure may lie within oneself—‘‘within your cheerful breast.’’This implied correspondence between subject and object is divinely providential. For Mr. Vallins, ‘‘probably the most striking affinity’’ between Akenside and Coleridge ‘‘is their paradoxical combination of the highest pleasure of ‘delight’ with an ideal of laborious evolutionary self-purification.’’In this well-written essay , it is argued that Akenside may have influenced the Romantics more than German Naturphilosophie: ‘‘Akenside’s suggestion that the clue to our identification with nature . . . is so strikinglysimilar to Coleridge’s and Schelling’s theories that one is . . . forced to point out the unoriginality of many of the ideas for which Schelling is well-known [sic].’’ Mr. Vallins’s point about Schelling needs further study. In the most interesting essay Mandy Green shows that Akenside’s odd poem, ‘‘Hymn to the Naiads,’’is modeled on the Greek hymns of Callimachus (this validates Joseph Warton’s remark that Akenside among his contemporaries was ‘‘the best Greek scholar since Milton’’). This poem more than any other sets Akenside apart from the Wartons and other poets of the ‘‘new sensibility’’because of its concern for public affairs; it reveals, in Ms. Green’s view, Akenside’s desireto be seen as an essential commentator on national affairs. Like ‘‘Windsor Forest,’’ this poem focuses symbolically on the vitality of the Thames, a locus amoenus for Akenside’s concerns. Akensidehastransferred the rural deities of classicalGreece to the English river to signify ‘‘thewholesale transfer of power from the ancient world to contemporary Britain.’’ Britain is‘‘heir toGreekpoliticalfreedom,whereas Rome is the fate and inevitable ruin of greatness.’’ Beyond this social commentary , Akenside ‘‘is clearly concerned to lay his claim to his right, as a poet, in presuming to speak on ‘themes / Not unregarded of coelestial powers.’’’ Four other essays have narrower concerns : Robin Dix discusses the precocity of the 1737 poems; Richard Terry recounts Akenside’s involvement in a debate over the moral value of ridicule;Harriett Jump examinesthepoet’sadmiration for Bishop Hoadly (expressed in an ode); and John Constable analyzes the differences in prosody between the two versions of the poem on the powers of the imagination. The final impressions from this collection are Akenside’s distinctive contributions to mid-century poetry and a new admiration for his complex intellect and his personal commitment to his craft. Henry L. Fulton Central Michigan University BRUCE MCLEOD. The Geography of Empire in English Literature, 1580– 1745. Cambridge: Cambridge, 1999. Pp. xii ⫹ 284. $65. The subject of The Geography of Empire is organization of space in early modern British culture. Mr. McLeod analyzes Spenser’s A View of the Present State of Ireland and Faerie Queene to lay out the paradigm of British colonialism: to ‘‘plot’’(as map and story) the land and thereby control the native population. The colonial project is driven by emerging capitalism’s expansionist need for new markets and resources, and the two dangers it faces are absorption into the 70 native population and individual greed displacing collective, national economic goals. Spenser directly argues this policy in his View and reasserts it in Faerie Queene ‘‘through episodes of negotiating a plainly anarchic geography’’and transforms it into a ‘‘capitalist spatial order.’’ This spatial order finds expression also in the English country house—and its poem—as well as in actual colonies such as Plymouth Plantation. The ‘‘country house ethos,’’‘‘the romanticization of the country house as a place of uncorrupted community,’’ Mr. McLeod shows, ‘‘is part of an imperial ethos imposed by the garrison governments . . . throughout the British realm.’’ Mr. McLeod argues that Milton, Behn, and Mary Rowlandson (1635–1711) all express the ‘‘necessity to organize, survey and, ultimately, police the domains of empire’’against ‘‘the danger of bodies merging or fusing with the wildness,’’ where ‘‘women pose a threat in some ways worse than that of the Indian or Irish, since they are an internal foe who can ruin the reproduction of civilization.’’ Rowlandson’s narrative, for example, ‘‘serves as a plumb line measuring the depths of Indian depravity’’ in which the ‘‘wandering female’’ signifies the threat to...