The subject of Britain analyses key seventeenth-century texts by Bacon, Jonson and Shakespeare within the context of the English reign of King James VI and I, whose desire to create a united Britain prompted serious reflection on questions of nationhood. This book traces writing on Britain and Britishness in succession literature, panegyric, Union tracts and treatises, play-texts and atlases. Focusing on texts printed in London and Edinburgh, as well as manuscript material that circulated within and across Britain and Ireland, this book sheds valuable light on texts in relation to the wider geopolitical context that informed their production. Combining literary criticism with political analysis and book history, The subject of Britain offers a fresh approach to a significant moment in British history, and will appeal to postgraduates and undergraduates of early modern British literary history.

Reviews

'... An absorbing and timely book.'
Early Modern Literary Studies

'. With its scrupulous close readings of an array of literary and political texts, including some that are little-known and others that have rarely been considered in this context, The Subject of Britain sheds powerful new light on what Britishness meant or could mean in the early years of the seventeenth century.'
The seventeenth century

'A lively, intelligent work that demonstrates how much more work needs to be done on ideas of Britain and Britishness.'
Andrew Hadfield, Journal of British Studies

'Christopher Ivic's monograph is a very readable study and a timely corrective to received critical thinking inherited down the generations (and endlessly recycled) concerning Jacobean succession literature.'
Modern Language Review

Introduction: accession, union, nationhood
1 'Englands King is comming to be Croun'd': English responses to the accession of King James VI and I
2 'This mighty worke of vnion': imagining union in early Jacobean panegyric
3 'But when this island shall be made Britain': Hume, Bacon, Britain and Britishness
4 'Our downfall Birthdome': reimagining nationhood in Macbeth
5 Conclusion: the Jacobean writing of Britain
Bibliography
Index