Representing Ireland Literature and the Origins of Conflict, 1534–1660

In this volume of essays a group of historians and literary critics debate the representation of early modern Ireland by English Renaissance authors. The contributions deal both with modes of representation – aesthetic, geographic, literary, political, visual – and with the biographies of representative individuals. Thus historical commentary and textual analysis go hand-in-hand with biography and chronology. The essays are interdisciplinary, combining traditional methods of literary and historical enquiry with a range of new theoretical approaches to texts and their authors. There are discussions of the work of major writers including John Bale, Gabriel Harvey, Barnaby Googe, Edmund Spenser, John Milton and Geoffrey Keating in the context of Irish politics from the Reformation to the Restoration.

Introduction: Irish representations and English alternatives; 1. The English invasion of Ireland; 2. Translating the reformation: John Bale's Irish Vocacyon; 3. Encountering Ireland: Gabriel Harvey, Edmund Spenser, and English Colonial Ventures; 4. Off the map: charting uncertainty in renaissance Ireland; 5. Mapping mutability: or, Spenser's Irish plot; 6. 'The Fatal Destiny of that Land': Elizabethan views of Ireland; 7. Tom Lee: the posing peacemaker; 8. Geoffrey Keating: apologist of Irish Ireland; 9. How Milton and some contemporaries read Spenser's View; 10. Extreme or mainstream?: the English independents and the Cromwellian reconquest of Ireland, 1649–1651.

These essays look mainly at the way in which Ireland was represented by English Renaissance writers in the early modern period. The contributions address questions of colonialism, nationalism and cultural identity, and are interdisciplinary in outlook.