Gerald MacLean – författare

Before they had an empire in the East, the British travelled into the Islamic world to pursue trade and to form strategic alliances against the Catholic powers of France and Spain. First-hand encounters with Muslims, Jews, Greek Orthodox, and other religious communities living together under tolerant Islamic rule changed forever the way Britons thought about Islam, just as the goods they imported from Islamic countries changed forever the way they lived. Britain and the Islamic World tells the story of how, for a century and a half, merchants and diplomats travelled from Morocco to Istanbul, from Aleppo to Isfahan, and from Hormuz to Surat, and discovered a world that was more fascinating than fearful.Gerald MacLean and Nabil Matar examine the place of Islam and Muslims in English thought, and how British monarchs dealt with supremely powerful Muslim rulers. They document the importance of diplomatic and mercantile encounters, show how the writings of captives spread unreliable information about Islam and Muslims, and investigate observations by travellers and clergymen who reported meetings with Jews, eastern Christians, Armenians, and Shi'ites. They also trace how trade and the exchange of material goods with the Islamic world shaped how people in Britain lived their lives and thought about themselves.

Among the foremost feminist critics to have emerged to international eminence over the last fifteen years, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak has relentlessly challenged the high ground of established theoretical discourse in literary and cultural studies. Although her rigorous reading of various authors has often rendered her work difficult terrain for those unfamiliar with poststructuralism, this collection makes significant strides in explicating Spivak's complicated theories of reading.

Among the foremost feminist critics to have emerged to international eminence over the last fifteen years, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak has relentlessly challenged the high ground of established theoretical discourse in literary and cultural studies. Although her rigorous reading of various authors has often rendered her work difficult terrain for those unfamiliar with poststructuralism, this collection makes significant strides in explicating Spivak's complicated theories of reading.

Between 1550 and 1850, the great age of mercantilism, the English people remade themselves from a disparate group of individuals and localities divided by feudal loyalties, dialects and even languages, into an imperial power. Examining literature, art and social life, and returning to ground first explored by Raymond Williams in his seminal work, The Country and the City Revisited traces this transformation. It shows that what Williams figured as an urban-rural dichotomy can now be more satisfactorily grasped as a permeable boundary. While the movement of sugar, tobacco and tea became ever more deeply interfused with the movement of people, through migration and the slave trade, these commodities initiated new conceptions of space, time and identity. Spanning the traditional periods of the Renaissance and Romanticism, this collection of essays offers exciting interdisciplinary perspectives on central issues of early modern English history.

What specifically distinguishes Restoration culture and society from what went before and came after? And how did early modern British women and men accommodate themselves to the dramatic historical changes of the seventeenth century? This study, which brings together recent work by leading historians as well as literary and cultural critics of the period, shows how the Restoration produced the concept of a national literature crucial to a new nationalist cultural enterprise: questions of national identity and difference, of what it meant to be English or British or both, came to be framed in terms of international trade and imperial ambition; and religious and royal authority gave way before the advance of a secular literary culture geared to the demands of a developing commercial and imperial nation.