Future History: Global Fantasies in Seventeenth-Century American and British Writings

By Kristina Bross

Future History traces the ways that English and American writers oriented themselves along an East-West axis to fantasize their place in the world. The book builds on new transoceanic scholarship and recent calls to approach early American studies from a global perspective. Such scholarship has largely focused on the early national period; Bross's work begins earlier and considers the intertwined identities of America, other English colonial sites and metropolitan England during a period before nation-state identities were hardened into the forms we know them today, when an English empire was nascent, not realized, and when a global perspective such as we might recognize it was just coming into focus for early modern Europeans. The author examines works that imagine England on a global stage in the Americas and East Indies just as--and in some cases even before--England occupied such spaces in force. Future History considers works written from the 1620s to the 1670s, but the center of gravity of Future History is writing at the mid-century, that is, writings coincident with the Interregnum, a time when England plotted and launched ambitious, often violent schemes to conquer, colonize or otherwise appropriate other lands, driven by both mercantile and religious desires.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0190665130
• ISBN13: 9780190665135
• Release Date: September 2017
• Publisher: Oxford Univ PR
• Length: 248 Pages
• Weight: 1.10 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.0" x 6.2" x 9.4"