An Empire Nowhere: England, America, and Literature from 'Utopia' to 'The Tempest.'

The subject of Jeffrey Knapp's book is English otherworldliness in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. By "otherworldliness," Knapp means the imaginative displacement of national, imperial, and poetic expansion onto "contrarily idealized" nowheres such as Utopia, Fairyland, representations of Virginia and Guiana and Prospero's haunted island. Knapp proposes that the incentive to empire had much to do with England's literary Renaissance. In fact, glory in empire resides in the literature of the period rather than in its history. Unlike so many recent New Historicist studies depicting English explorers in this period as potently rapacious, Knapp's book reminds us that the English were slow to colonize the New World, and that their early imperial attempts ended mostly in failure. Paradoxically, this very inexpertise enabled poets to valorize England by imaginatively resituating its imperial successes in worlds elsewhere. Deficiency, disability and disgrace were built into Elizabethan descriptions of poetry, and in fact it is the paradoxical relationship between national and poetic deficiency on the one hand and sublimity on the other which chiefly characterizes what Knapp calls "the literary boom in Renaissance England." The purpose of Knapp's project is at least three-fold: to open anew connections between colonial and literary activity in the English Renaissance; to offer new readings of Utopia, The Fairie Queene, and The Tempest as well as readings of a wealth of lesser-known works from the period, from Wyatt's "Tagus Farewell," Lyly's Midas, John Smith's Map of Guiana, to Beaumont's Metamorphosis of Tobacco; and, finally, to illuminate the poetic and nationalist character of Elizabethan England through the collection of practices Knapp brings together under the term of "trifling."

"Trifles" and "trifling" are central to this project. Knapp uses "trifling" to mean many things: indirection, unworldliness, superstition, error, incapacity, introversion, distraction, and disgrace. As examples of trifles for the English in this period Knapp offers America, epic, pastoral, tobacco, virginity, empire, and marriage. At times he uses "trifling" to mean devaluation, dismissal, or indifference; at times, to mean contemptus; at times to describe the material exchange of baubles or trifles notoriously characterizing English barter with the Indians. Most potently, the term conveys "contrary idealization," a way of rendering an idea (or object) simultaneously powerful and inconsequential. Given the prominence of the term for Knapp's project, I was surprised not to find its etymological background surveyed (the word derives from the Old French truffle, meaning trickery), or to come across a catalogue of its meanings in the period. Rich as the connections are which Knapp draws between trifling, toying, and devaluing, the term's multiple meanings occasionally weaken its usefulness.

Knapp's chapters are linked by this notion of trifling, a scheme of organization which may frustrate or confuse some readers. In some instances Knapp himself seems to employ trifling as a method; his chapter on "Divine Tobacco," for example, uses indirection to discuss its covert subject, a crucial passage in the Fairie Queene. Four of Knapp's six substantive chapters are engaged with Spenser, directly or indirectly: there is a book within a book here on Spenser and colonialism. This material is especially strong and will make an important contribution to Spenserian scholarship. In these chapters, as throughout, what is most impressive is the breadth of Knapp's research and his illustrative examples. While readers looking for lengthy or detailed readings of either Utopia or The Tempest may be disappointed (these texts are treated briefly in chapters busy with other materials, and their readings are hinted at more than realized), Knapp is to be commended for collecting and comparing unusual texts as well as for offering a fresh approach to the relations between imperial and poetic ambition in Elizabeth's reign.

Knapp concludes his study with an epilogue on the poem as heterocosm or otherworld, shaping his discussion around texts by Cowley, Dryden, Traherne, William Bradford, and Alexander Pope, among others. Rather than concluding his preceding arguments, this final chapter introduces a new set of questions. Other-worldliness in Jacobean and Caroline England, when imperialism was no longer "trifling," cannot be adequately addressed in so narrow a compass. Still, this is a learned and probing book, an important contribution to scholarship on English cultural history in the period.

Amy Boesky BOSTON COLLEGE