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Although much attention has been paid to early modern European
travel to the New World, attention is just beginning to be paid to
the travels in the Old World, even though they speak to
contemporary concerns with categories like civilization, race, and
nation as much as, sometimes more than, the New World explorations.
This book aligns travel narratives and historical surveys of parts
of the Old World--Egypt, Mesopotamia, India, and Russia--with texts
by Shakespeare, Milton, and Dryden that contributed to English
ideas about those regions. Addressing the current interest in
Europe's relationship with its neighbors and near-neighbors in the
Old World, the author introduces the term "paracolonial" to
describe Europe's attitude toward those areas where its colonial
reach was intermittent or nonexistent.
The book begins by matching ancient and early modern accounts of
Egypt and Ethiopia with Shakespeare's "Antony and Cleopatra,"
showing how antiquity's veneration of Egyptian values was tainted
in Shakespeare's time by anxieties of racial and sexual
degeneration. The next chapter, centered on Milton's "Paradise
Lost," relates degeneration to the epic cycle of imperial rise and
fall attributed to Southwest Asia and its monumental ruins by
European historians and travelers. The Elizabethan and Jacobean
fascination with Russia is the topic of the third chapter, which
argues that Herodotus' Scythia and early modern slavery were the
dual origins of the barbarous Russia glimpsed in Shakespeare's
"Love's Labour's Lost" and Milton's "Muscovia." In the process, the
author offers a novel explanation for the puzzling link between
Russia and racial "blackness" in the English Renaissance. The book
concludes with India, where degeneration, cyclic empire, and bodily
images of racial and sexual difference were combined in
geographical writings and sensationally staged in Dryden's
"Aureng-Zebe."
Tracing the overlap between Graeco-Roman geography and the
itineraries of Renaissance travelers and traders, "Old Worlds"
brings together a rich array of texts that rewrite European
traditions about a plural antiquity from an early modern English
perspective.
This work uncovers a culture of courtly surveillance, secrecy, and
espionage in an era generally regarded, since Foucault, as
characterised by the association of sovereignty with public
display. Examining the centrality of espionage in the careers and
works of Michel de Montaigne, Sir Philip Sidney, Christopher
Marlowe, Ben Jonson, and Sir Francis Bacon, it demonstrates the
association of surveillance with sovereignty before surveillance
became the characteristic mode of discipline in the modern,
abstract state. The author substantially revises our understanding
of the relationship between power and knowledge in the rise of the
modern state while subtly illuminating the inscription of that
relationship within Renaissance texts.
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