England’s Asian Renaissance

England's Asian Renaissance explores how Asian knowledges, narratives, and customs inflected early modern English literature. Just as Asian imports changed England's tastes and enriched the English language, Eastern themes, characters, and motifs helped shape the country's culture and contributed to its national identity. Questioning long-standing dichotomies between East and West and embracing a capacious understanding of translatio as geographic movement, linquistic transformation, and cultural grafting, the collection gives pride of place to convergence, approximation, and hybridity, thus underscoring the radical mobility of early modern culture. In so doing, England's Asian Renaissance also moves away from entrenched narratives of Western cultural sovereignty to think anew England's debts to Asia.
Published by the University of Delaware Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.

England's Asian Renaissance examines the often-subtle ways in which Asian cultures inflected the literature of early modern England, with an eye toward patterns of cross-cultural fertilization, mediation, and convergence. The collection moves away from hegemonic narratives of English cultural and political sovereignty to underscore the radically mobile nature of early modern culture.     

SU FANG NG is a professor of English and the Clifford A. Cutchins III professor at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg. She is the author of Literature and the Politics of Family in Seventeenth-Century England and Alexander the Great from Britain to Southeast Asia: Peripheral Empires in the Global Renaissance.
CARMEN NOCENTELLI is an associate professor of English and comparative literature at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque. She is the author of Empires of Love: Europe, Asia, and the Making of Early Modern Identity, which won the Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize in Comparative Literary Studies from the Modern Language Association and the Roland H. Bainton Prize from the Sixteenth Century Society and Conference.

  England’s Asian Renaissance: An Introduction                        
Su Fang Ng and Carmen Nocentelli
 
 
Part 1    The Eurasian Continuum
 
1    The Ottomans in and of Europe                           
Abdulhamit Arvas
 
2    Robert Sherley and the Persian Habit                           
Nedda Mehdizadeh
 
3    The East India Spice Trade and the Circulation of Shakespearean Imagination    
Thea Buckley
 
Part 2    Religious and Cultural Negotiations
 
4    Religious Emotion and Racialization: Marlowe’s Sigismund and the Making     
of Europe
Jennifer Feather
 
5    Solomon, Ophir, and the English Quest for the East Indies               
Amrita Sen
 
6    Welfare and Work for All: King Lear and Poor Relief in China and Early         
Modern England
Rachana Sachdev
 
Part 3    Making the English Stage Eastern
 
7    Staging China and India in Jacobean Court Masques: Negotiating Antiquity,    
Admiration, and Authority in 1604
Emily Soon
 
8    Constructing the New Exchange: Jonson’s Entertainment at Britain’s Bourse    
Richmond Barbour
 
Bibliography                                            
 
About the Contributors