English National Identity and the Image of the Dutch

This book makes newly visible the sustained engagement of the English and the Dutch throughout a critical century in their cultural and national development. It reads a broad selection of early modern literary texts, some never before treated in Anglophone scholarship, in which the Dutch and the English wrote about each other and themselves. This interdisciplinary study brings to light the key affinities of these two nations: their embrace of liberty, turn toward Protestantism, and pursuit of commerce. It shows that as Catholic, colonial powers worked to prevent the rise of early modern Europe’s two great Protestant states, those similarities—as well as a combination of English admiration, envy, and distrust of the Dutch—produced an emulous rivalry that remade the two nations and their literature. Andrew Fleck is Associate Professor of English at the University of Texas in El Paso, USA, where he specializes in Early Modern and Eighteenth-Century British literature and culture. Andrew has published a variety of articles on the literary prose of this period, from Mandeville’s Travels to Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe. Publications on the early modern English and Dutch include an essay on performing foreign tongues on the English stage (in MaRDiE), syphilis in The Dutch Courtesan (in Early Theatre), the 1603 plague epidemic (forthcoming in JMMLA), Thomas Scott and the English community in the Low Countries (in Studies in Medieval and Renaissance History), and several shorter notes (in Notes and Queries and ANQ).