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

Abstract

Archipelagic English, John Kerrigan tells us early in his prodigious new book, ‘does not assume that talk of a British problem answers the major questions in seventeenth-century historiography, and it is decidedly not a set of literary illustrations of the thesis; it mounts a broader, less doctrinal investigation, in the course of which issues underlined by the new British history come into view meshed with others which also impelled the production of literature across the three kingdoms’ (p. 26). These apparently modest claims do not do justice to Kerrigan's extraordinary achievement. Kerrigan is right: his overall approach is not ‘doctrinal’, and often his rich, nuanced inquires into ‘seventeenth-century writers who are anglophone but not necessarily English’ (p. 10) can be reduced to a ‘thesis’ only with difficulty. But what puts this book far ahead of any previous attempt to account for literary relations among the ‘Three Kingdoms’ (England, Scotland, and Ireland) in this period is precisely its refusal to be locked into an analytical framework, its insistence that there is always more to bring within the frame. ‘“Really, universally, relations stop nowhere”’ he quotes Henry James as saying at one point, and ‘yet’, he adds, perhaps a little regretfully, ‘they have to in a book’ (p. 57).

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