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Description of  Island Garden: England's Language of Nation from Gildas to Marvell (ReFormations: Medieval and Early Modern)

0268041407 pdf For centuries Englands writers used the metaphor of their country as an island garden to engage in a self-conscious debate about national identity. In The Island Garden: Englands Language of Nation from Gildas to Marvell, Lynn Staley suggests that the trope of Britain as an island garden catalyzed two crucial historical perspectives and thus analytic modes: as isolated and vulnerable, England stood in a potentially hostile relation to the world outside its encircling sea as semi-enclosed and permeable, it also accepted recuperative relationships with those who moved across its boundaries. Identifying the concept of enclosure as key to Britains language of place, Staley traces the shifting meanings of this concept in medieval and early modern histories, treatises, and poems. Read more