Focusing on Ireland and the New World - the two central colonial projects of Elizabethan and Stuart England - this book explores the emergings of a colonialist consciousness in the writings and politics of the English Renaissance.

It looks at how the literary production of the period engages England's settlement of colonies in the New World and its colonial designs in Ireland by offering multiple perspectives in constant collision and negotiation: White/Black social relations; the politics of the colonization of Ireland; imagings and figurations of overseas expansionism; and the relationship between culture, theology, and colonial expansion.

This book focuses its reading of the poetics and politics of colonial expansion in Renaissance England on the lives and writings of such diverse figures as Sir Walter Ralegh, John Donne, Richard Hakluyt, Samuel Purchas, William Shakespeare, Edmund Spenser, and John Milton. It studies a wide range of texts, including The Discoverie of Guiana, Virginia's Verger, Othello, The Faerie Queene, A View of the Present State of Ireland, Paradise Lost, and Paradise Regained.

It also examines the inscription in these writings of themes, motifs, and tropes frequently found in colonial texts: the land as desiring female body and object of desire; the masculinist gaze responding to the exotic; and the experience of the thrilling sensations of wonder.