Archipelagic English: Literature, History, and Politics 1603-1707 - Hardcover

It is a work of prodigious scholarship, engagement and memory. (Milton Quarterly)

Archipelagic English presents a rare and compelling combination of acute and extensive historical analysis with scrupulous and sensitive close reading (Philip Schwyzer, Textual Practice)

This is a commanding, scholarly tome, and a hugely impressive achievement (Forum for Modern Language Studies)

The geographical sophistication of Kerrigan's criticism...is a benchmark for all to aspire to and makes this an important book for historical geographers as well as critics (Robert Mayhew, Journal of Historical Geography)

brilliant...It gives superb new readings of well-familiar works such as Macbeth (Declan Kiberd, Irish Times)

important and deeply researched... As a dense literary and political prehistory of the puzzles in national and cultural identity ... Archipelagic English can't be beaten (Michael Dobson, London Review of Books)

His purpose, triumphantly achieved, is to review and ruminate on the variety of literary responses to the awkward conglomerate of the Stuart monarchy... [This is a] remarkable investigation. (Toby Barnard, Times Literary Supplement)

Kerrigan constructs an impressively wide-ranging vision of an early modern Britain filtered through achipelago prisms (Notes and Queries)

A major work of scholarship and literary criticism that opens up numerous avenues for others to follow (Andrew Hadfield, Review of English Studies)

Kerrigan is a scrupulous and careful scholar [who provides] subtle, informed explorations of key writers and text. ... Although this book will be too dense and learned ... for some general readers, it is an important one... (Nicholas Murray. The Independent.)

Seventeenth-century 'English Literature' has long been thought about in narrowly English terms. Archipelagic English corrects this by devolving anglophone writing, showing how much remarkable work was produced in Wales, Scotland, and Ireland, and how preoccupied such English authors as Shakespeare, Milton, and Marvell were with the often fraught interactions between ethnic, religious, and national groups around the British-Irish archipelago. This book transforms our understanding of canonical texts from Macbeth to Defoe's Colonel Jack, but it also shows the significance of a whole series of authors (from William Drummond in Scotland to the Earl of Orrery in County Cork) who were prominent during their lifetimes but who have since become neglected because they do not fit the Anglocentric paradigm. With its European and imperial dimensions, and its close attention to the cultural make-up of early modern Britain and Ireland, Archipelagic English authoritatively engages with, questions, and develops the claim now made by historians that the crises of the seventeenth century stem from the instabilities of a state-system which, between 1603 and 1707, was multiple, mixed, and inclined to let local quarrels spiral into all-consuming conflict. This is a major, interdisciplinary contribution to literary and historical scholarship which is also set to influence present-day arguments about devolution, unionism, and nationalism in Britain and Ireland.