Between Spenser and Swift: English Writing in Seventeenth-Century Ireland

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Cambridge University Press, Jun 10, 2005 - Literary Criticism - 294 pages
While recent studies of Edmund Spenser and Jonathan Swift have firmly relocated both writers in their Irish as well as their English context, English writing in Ireland between these monolithic figures has been largely neglected. This study explores in detail the literary territory between Spenser and Swift. Examining a range of texts, from fragments to sophisticated publications such as economic improvement manuals, histories, plays, romances and poems, Deana Rankin demonstrates how writers in Ireland articulated the transition from soldier to settler across this century of war and political turmoil. She illuminates both centre and periphery by revealing for the first time the richness of English writing in Ireland during the period and its sustained engagement with canonical English literature, including Shakespeare, Sidney and Milton. Historians and literary scholars will find much to discover in this significant contribution to early modern British studies.

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Contents

Between soldier and settler the English parliamentary writing of Ireland
31
Writing the Irish subject 163341
75
An Aphorismical Discovery of Treasonable Faction the search for citizenship 164252
117
Hannibal in Capua
149
Relating the Truth of Things Past
157
Staging resolution Restoration romance and the Dublin theatre
159
History romance and the writings of Richard Bellings
191
The Paper Warre you must expect to be assaulted with English histories of Ireland 166089
230
from Spenser to Swift
272
Index
284
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