New Books In Literary Studies

As they explored and struggled to establish settlements in what they called ‘new found lands’, the encounter with the peoples of those lands deeply affected how the British saw themselves. From the onset of colonisation, exotic visitors appeared in London. We recognise their names: Pocahontas, Manteo, Squanto. If you look carefully, they are a constant presence: in the decorative cartouches of 17th and 18th century maps; in the illustrated title pages of texts promoting colonisation; and present, though heavily filtered through the assumptions of British culture, in many other texts – poems, plays, treatises on political theory and philosophy, and in novels – a form that was new, which confronted a world that was ancient.The intensity of this cultural encounter, which is all too familiar to those who work on the history of colonial and federal America, has been overlooked in some circles of British studies. The multi-volume Oxford History of the British Empire, for example, devoted just 2 of 47 essays to the