Full Description
This book makes newly visible the sustained engagement of the English and the Dutch throughout a critical century in their cultural and national development. It reads a broad selection of early modern literary texts, some never before treated in Anglophone scholarship, in which the Dutch and the English wrote about each other and themselves. This interdisciplinary study brings to light the key affinities of these two nations: their embrace of liberty, turn toward Protestantism, and pursuit of commerce. It shows that as Catholic, colonial powers worked to prevent the rise of early modern Europe's two great Protestant states, those similarities—as well as a combination of English admiration, envy, and distrust of the Dutch—produced an emulous rivalry that remade the two nations and their literature.
Contents
Introduction: Dutch Industry and English Identity.- Chapter One: Rescuing the Widow Belge: Chivalry in the Construction of Elizabethan Englishness.- Chapter Two: Wooing in English: Staging the Dutch in English Comedy.- Chapter Three: These Factions and Schisms: Countering Absolutist Thought in Church and State.- Chapter Four: England's Thirst for News: Dutch News and the English Public Sphere.- Chapter Five: Rome and Carthage: Figuring the Anglo-Dutch Wars.- Chapter Six: The New Black Legend: England's Violent Colonial Competition with the Dutch.- Conclusion
