Atlantic Circulations - Literature, Reception and Imperial Identities, 1650-1750

Atlantic Circulations investigates literary conversations about empire in the British Atlantic world, c. 1650-1750. Reading texts by Anne Bradstreet, John Milton, Daniel Defoe, and Benjamin Franklin, as well as writing by overlooked authors who deserve more attention, such as the Quaker anti-slavery activist Benjamin Lay and the Black classicist Francis Williams, it asks how literary culture interacted with transatlantic debates about law, enslavement, economics, and religious freedom.

This study explores the relationship between literature and empire by joining up disciplinary areas - Early Modern English Literature and Early American Literature - which are often considered apart. It develops insights and analytical frameworks from recent British and -Atlantic World- history to argue that the transatlantic reception of literary texts was often shaped by -archipelagic- dynamics: political and religious tensions between and within England and Wales, and Scotland and Ir