Literature in English in the seventeenth century was not just the product of writers in England who complacently assumed their Englishness, John Kerrigan insists in his Archipelagic English, both tour d’horizon and tour de force. His immediate target is what he calls “Eng. Lit.,” the academic preoccupation with a literary canon whose first definition, he points out, was the work of Scots. But historians too may be in his sights, since despite the emergence of “new British” and “new Irish” histories, few have entirely freed themselves of the Whig interpretation, which centers a triumphalist, and overwhelmingly English, master narrative on 1649 and 1688. For Kerrigan, the years 1603 and 1707 that bracket his study have claims to centrality in a very different narrative—or, rather, series of narratives, not triumphalist but often conflicting and always compromised—that ought to be spun from the writings in English of those who inhabited the islands off the northwest coast of Europe.

Perhaps the most challenging parts of Kerrigan's book are the long introduction and epilogue (90 pages and 60 pages, respectively). These seek to destabilize: the former, by confronting the dominant idea of a nation and a national culture; the latter, by engaging with 1707 and the myth of union. Historians should read both. The former offers a sustained and thoughtful questioning of the interplay of cultural regions and of ethnic and religious minorities; of the meanings of empire; of the circulations of terms and texts; of the writing of “English” in Wales, in Ireland, in Scotland; and of use of the various languages of the islands. The epilogue explores the debate over the meaning of 1707 in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. With deft surveys of Scottish, Irish, and Welsh literary revanchisms, Kerrigan establishes in new ways the contested nature of the nation and the culture whose union Anglocentric politicians and publicists boasted, even as scholars began to establish the authors and texts that were to denominate the face of “Eng. Lit.” to the world. Using Swift, Hume, and Scott—non-English all—to telling effect, Kerrigan demonstrates the processes of negotiation that underlay the construction of an “Eng. Lit.” for which “English” has always been to varying degrees a misnomer.

And in between the bookends, Kerrigan invites us to think again about moments and writers we thought we knew by taking us for a tour of the four nations at various points in the long seventeenth century. In a context of regal union and the investiture of Henry Prince of Wales, he demonstrates systematic and complex three-kingdom and four-nation concerns in Englishmen's works canonical (Macbeth, Cymbeline) and uncanonical (A Shoo-maker a Gentleman, The Valiant Welshman), before moving to other centers where English was written. The continuing ambivalences, cultural and political alike, about the departure of the king, about regal union, indeed about regal power itself emerge clearly in Kerrigan's assessment of the work of Scots north (Drummond of Hawthornden) and south (Sir William Alexander) of the border. Few readers will be surprised that Ireland's contested identities should yield textual contestations that went beyond mere polemic, although they will surely value Kerrigan's unfolding of works whose dramatic forms resound with the gathering crisis: Straffordian (Shirley's St. Patrick), Old English (Burnell's Landgartha), and Jesuit (Titus of 1644). They will learn much too from Kerrigan's chapter “God in Wales,” which offers wholehearted confirmation to those scholars who have argued the significance of the Tudor printing of the Bible in Welsh to a nation statutorily absorbed into England. The impassioned spirituality and cultural resurgence that that text fostered flowed into English-language verse from Wales too, Kerrigan insists, as he surveys the rhythms and references of writers as various as Morgan Llwyd, Henry Vaughan, and Katherine Philips. All of them, even Philips, proudly asserted forms of Welshness as they wrote what Kerrigan judges among the finest English religious verse of the century. Although Wales then disappears from the reckoning, to be rediscovered only in the epilogue, the second half of the book is otherwise shaped to a similar pattern. A chapter on the British-Irish glances of the two major “Anglo-English” figures of the midcentury crisis, John Milton and Andrew Marvell, is followed by fascinating accounts of Scotland's British bearing in the time of the bishops’ persecutions, told once again through writers north (Sir George Mackenzie, William Cleland) and south (Marvell) of the border, and of dramatic works written from Derry, that center of the most acute contest.

There can be no question, Kerrigan shows, of the ability of crisis to prompt writers across genres and media to imaginative engagement, and one nineteenth-century Ulster writer testified that the plays written out of the siege of Derry and the Williamite wars had been the “school-books” of his youth. There is no question too that it was the careers that were fundamentally driven by the dramas of union that constitute the most effective substantive chapters in Kerrigan's book. To be reminded of Milton's developing antipathies for Scots Presbyterians and of Marvell's attention in the Horatian Ode to Scots and Irish is welcome (although we might wonder about the archipelagic auguries in that poem's closing vision of the erect sword), and to be brought to contemplate Marvell's reorientation in the Character of Holland of the geography of an imagined union amid the Republic's conflicted addresses to the Dutch perhaps doubly so. But it is when Kerrigan turns to the sustained writings of those who lived the dilemmas of union—to the romance and the dramas of the Earl of Orrery, a central figure in the politics of all three kingdoms, and to the various works of Defoe aimed in both directions across the Scottish border in the Union crisis—that the approach and the book most enthrall.

Traces of that old “Eng. Lit.” turn nevertheless remain. Kerrigan reconciles his historical approach with the enduring canon by what on occasion looks like sleight of hand. Macbeth “sees beyond the horizon of Jacobean geopolitics to the playing out of British-Irish problems in the 1640s and far beyond” (18). With its momentary conviction that the text operates in an eternal present, this sounds a bit like New Criticism set to New British time. There are deeper problems in the dimensional limits of Kerrigan's contextualization. His sensitivity to the archipelagic engagements of an enormous range of texts is enviable, but his attention to their writers is—perhaps necessarily—less. Orrery and Defoe get star billing and are deeply contextualized. But does it make a difference to how we interpret Marvell's archipelagian gestures that his Character of Holland has plausibly been argued to have been a job performance and that his admiring portrait of Archibald Douglas, “The Loyall Scot,” is suffused with an intense voyeurism? At one point, Kerrigan observes of the anti-Dutch notes sounded by Milton and Marvell, “Elites could invoke ethnic stereotypes … without regarding them as comprehensively valid” (223). That may be true, but how do we know it wasn’t the notes of praise that were contingent, while the prejudices were deeply felt? Unless we pursue writers through their texts, it's hard to determine what we’re left with beyond references, allusions, and figures deployed for occasional purposes in a seventeenth century in which archipelagic encounters repeatedly but not continuously occupied shifting attentions in England.

Perhaps this is simply to argue that while those from beyond England's borders were likelier to engage in sustained fashion with the archipelagic dilemmas of Englishness and writing in English than were “Anglo-English” writers, who—with the heroic exception of Defoe, once he had been sent to Edinburgh—tended to opportunism and the contingent when they registered those dilemmas. Yet Defoe's ambivalences went beyond the strategic discrepancies uncovered by Kerrigan. With his twelve-book Jure Divino, a celebration of 1688 that, unlike his Union pamphlets, was not written for hire and that he thought (in his wrongheaded “Eng. Lit.” way?) would make his mark as a poet, Defoe provided grist for the Whig narrative mill as well as for Kerrigan's archipelagic challenge. But no question, those multiplying encounters with archipelagic others were shaping writings and identities across the archipelago; and no question, too, we will be using Kerrigan's book to interpret those processes for a long time.