Archipelagic Identities explores the invention and interplay of national, regional and linguistic identities in the literatures of early modern Britain and Ireland. The volume includes innovative work by leading practitioners of British studies, and sheds new light on classic cases such as Edmund Spenser's Irish experience, whilst also introducing less familiar writers and texts, such as Anne Dowriche's The French Historie, William Browne's Britannia Pastorals, William Richards' Wallography, Anne Bradstreet's 'Dialogue between Old England and New', and the works of Gaelic bards and French Huguenot refugees. Foregrounding issues of gender, class and migratory identity which have not previously received significant attention in this field, Archipelagic Identities brings British studies into the mainstream of contemporary literary criticism.

Contents: Introduction; Philip Schwyzer; An uncertain union (a dialogue), David Baker and Willy Maley; Part I Looking for Britain: This pleasant and sceptred isle: insular fantasies of national identity in Anne Dowriche's The French Historie and William Shakespeare's Richard II, Kate Chedgzoy; Whose pastorals? William Browne of Tavistock and the Singing of Britannia, Gillian Wright; Defoe, Scotland and Union, John Kerrigan; Part II Spenser's Islands: Marrying waterways: politicizing and gendering the landscape in Spenser's Faerie Queene River-Marriage Canto, Joan Fitzpatrick; From Irish countries to English counties: state sovereignty and territorial reorganization in early modern Ireland, Swen Voekel; Spenser and the Stuart succession, Andrew Hadfield; Part III Representing the Nation: Provincial identification and the struggle over representation in Thomas Coryat's Crudities (1611), Melanie Ord; The complaint of Caledonia: Scottish identity and the female voice, Murray G.H. Pittock; 'A witty book, but mostly feigned': William Richards' Wallography and perceptions of Wales in later 17th-century England, Michael Roberts; Part IV Immigrants and Emigrants: 'Signes of a Stranger': the English language and the English Nation in the late 16th century, Emma Smith; O Belle Tamise: the development of a Huguenot pastoral mode in Elizabethan England, Simon Mealor; 'Our British land': Anne Bradstreet's Atlantic perspective, Christopher Ivic; Bibliography; Index.