Introduction; 1. Writing the Forgotten War I: Henry's War, 1542-7; 2. Writing the Forgotten War II: Somerset's War, 1547-1550; 3. How England Became an Island: The Faerie Queene; 4. Scotland sui juris? Scottish Literature and the Marian Constitutional Crisis, 1567-73; 5. On the Knees of the Body Politic: Scottish Succession and English Liberties, 1567-1608; 6. Scotland Un-kingdomed: English History on Stage; 7. Race-Making in the Invention of Britain: The Masque of Blackness; 8. Divisions and Kingdoms: Oedipal Britain from Gorboduc to King Lear; Coda: Macbeth. 'Alas, poor country'.
Our image of England as island nation is the legacy of the Elizabethan literary erasure of Scotland.
Lorna Hutson is Merton Professor of English Literature at the University of Oxford. She is a Fellow of the British Academy and Director of the Centre for Early Modern Studies at Oxford. She is the author of many books including Thomas Nashe in Context, The Usurer's Daughter, The Invention of Suspicion (which won the Roland Bainton Prize), and Circumstantial Shakespeare. She is the editor of The Oxford Handbook of English Law and Literature, 1500-1700, which won the Bainton Reference Prize in 2018.
'This is, quite simply, a superb book. Ranging across a wide
variety of sources - legal documents, neo-Latin, visual arts,
cartography, poetry, prose, and drama - it does urgent and
necessary work, anatomising the fiction of England's depiction as
an 'island' nation and addressing the neglect of Scotland in
accounts of English nationhood, an occlusion which Hutson
convincingly traces to the persistent legacy of Tudor
propagandists.' Cathy Shrank, Professor of English, University of
Sheffield
'Lorna Hutson's brilliant book demonstrates how Elizabethan writers
actively marginalized Scotland in the service of an Anglo-imperial
view of English insularity. As Hutson shows, the trope of England
as an 'island nation,' usually taken to be a mere geographic
incoherence, is integral to an ideological project designed to
diminish Scotland. Featuring incisive analyses of paintings, maps,
chronicle histories and literary texts by Shakespeare, Spenser,
Jonson and others, England's Insular Imagining will transform the
ways in which scholars think about both Anglo-Scottish relations
and the formation of English national identity in the early modern
period.' Garrett Sullivan, Liberal Arts Professor of English, The
Pennsylvania State University
'This powerfully innovative book is an astonishing achievement. It
transforms our understanding of early modern literature by
recovering and precisely explicating the history of invasion and
occlusion that characterises England's relationship with Scotland
from the 1540s to the 1600s. Anyone interested in race,
ethnicity and nationhood, and the persistence of Scottish cultural
and political identity, will learn from its many
insights. Drawing on a huge range of sources, from medieval
chronicle and Tudor polemic through battlefield reports, Lorna
Hutson gives us fresh, authoritative readings of such canonical
works as The Faerie Queene, Henry V, King Lear and Macbeth.' John
Kerrigan, Professor of English, St John's College, Cambridge
'In the lengthening shadow of Brexit, this exciting book is as
timely as it is innovative for the politics of major Elizabethan
writing. Turning from static ideology to active imagining, Hutson
shows how authors built the strange conceptual space of the
'sceptred isle' by erasing the inconvenient reality of Scotland. A
'must read' for anyone navigating the currents of literary
imagination, sovereignty, insularity, and the politics of
boundaries.' Gordon Teskey, Francis Lee Higginson Professor of
English Literature, Harvard University
'Once Hutson has pointed it out, the absence of Scotland in Tudor
culture is, paradoxically, unmissable. This radical reassessment
shows with lucid delicacy how literature was requisitioned in
service of a wobbly concept of English insularity. Shakespeare's
famous 'this sceptred isle' turns out to be less a specific
rhetorical anomaly and more a central statement of ideological
erasure.' Emma Smith, Hertford College, University of Oxford
'In this masterful new literary history of English imperialism,
Lorna Hutson trains her keen eye on the obscured histories of Tudor
wars of conquest in Scotland and claims of English overlordship.
Her astute unpacking of the rhetorical strategies of English
imaginative work have resonance beyond Anglo-Scottish relations.
This important book recovers Scotland as a forgotten early case of
English imperialism that would later expand across the globe.' Su
Fang Ng, Professor of English, Virginia Tech
'A brilliant, subtle work. As the first scholar to fully understand
the importance of the English campaigns against Scotland in the
sixteenth century, Lorna Hutson transforms our understanding of
early modern British nationhood.' Her book offers a set of
revelatory readings of works by Spenser, Jonson, and Shakespeare,
whose plays and poems are newly understood as being shaped not just
by Scottish politics but also by the English state's efforts to
imagine itself as an island nation, in defiance of geography.' Bart
Van Es, author of The Cut Out Girl (winner of the 2018 Costa Book
of the Year) and Professor of English Literature, St Catherine's
College, Oxford
'… a most magnificent constitutional and literary history …' Joyce
McMillan, The Scotsman
'This book will incite arguments, breed scholarship, beget articles
and enrich our understanding of a period we thought we knew well…
Hutson has not just laid the groundwork for the next generation of
critics; she has set the bar high for future interdisciplinary work
in this field.' Willy Maley, TLS
'This well-researched, well-written, and lavishly illustrated work
opens new avenues of investigation into the entanglement and
interactions of the peoples and nations of the British Isles. …
Highly recommended.' S. J. Stillwell Jr, CHOICE
'although Hutson has not managed singlehandedly to pull Scotland
out of Great Britain, she has put its geopolitical situation into a
new perspective.' John Kerrigan, London Review of Books
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