Colonial Virtue: The Mobility of Temperance in Renaissance England - Hardcover

Kasey Evans

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1442643595 ISBN 13: 9781442643598

Publisher: University of Toronto Press, 2012

Synopsis

Colonial Virtue is the first study to focus on the role played by the virtue of temperance in shaping ethical debates about early English colonialism. Kasey Evans tracks the migration of ideas surrounding temperance from classical and humanist writings through to sixteenth- and seventeenth-century applications, emphasizing the ways in which they have transcended the vocabularies of geography and time.Colonial Virtue offers fresh insights into how English Renaissance writers used temperance as a privileged lens through which to view New World morality and politically to justify colonial practices in Virginia and the West Indies. Evans uses literary texts, including The Fairie Queene and The Tempest, and sources such as sermons, dictionaries, and visual artifacts, to navigate alliances between traditional semantics and post-colonial political criticism. Beautifully written and deeply engaging, Colonial Virtue also models an expansive methodology for literary studies through its close readings and rhetorical analyses.

About this title

About the Author

Kasey Evans is an assistant professor in the Department of English at Northwestern University.

Edition details

• Publisher: University of Toronto Press
• Publication date: 2012
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1442643595
• ISBN 13: 9781442643598
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 264