Marvelous Possessions
The Wonder of the New World. The Clarendon Lectures and the Carpenter Lectures 1988
Stephen Greenblatt
Price: £28.00 (Paperback)
ISBN-13: 978-0-19-812266-1
Publication date: 29 October 1992
Clarendon Press
216 pages, 8 pp plates, halftones, 234x156 mm
Series: Clarendon Paperbacks
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| Reviews |
| - 'his writing teems with apt insight' - Financial Times
- 'a subtle, witty analysis of the "possessive madness" and sleight of mind by which Christian capitalism turned marvel into mandate.' - Observer
- '"Marvelous Possessions is a marvellous book. It is also a compelling and powerful one. Nothing so original has ever been written on European responses to "the wonder of the New World"."
Times Literary Supplement
' -
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| Description |
`And there I found very many islands filled with people innumerable, and of all of them I have taken possession for their highnesses, by proclamation made and with the royal standard unfurled, and no one contradicted me' - Christopher Columbus
Marvelous Possessions
is a study of the ways in which Europeans of the late Middle Ages and the early modern period represented non-European
peoples and took possession of their lands, in particular the New World.
In a series of innovative readings of travel narratives, judicial documents, and official reports, Greenblatt shows that the experience of the marvelous, central to both art and philosophy, was cunningly yoked by Columbus and others to the service of colonial appropriation. He argues that the traditional symbolic actions
and legal rituals through which European sovereignty was asserted were strained to breaking-point by the unprecedented nature of the discovery of the New World. But the book also shows that the experience of the marvelous is not necessarily an agent of empire: in writers as different as Herodotus, Jean de Léry, and Montaigne - and notably in Mandeville's Travels
, the most popular travel
book of the Middle Ages - wonder is the sign of a remarkably tolerant recognition of cultural difference.
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Readership: General readers interested in travel writing; academics interested in literature, literary theory, history, travel narratives, ethnography, anthropology, and cultural studies.
| Authors, editors,
and contributors |
Stephen Greenblatt, The Class of 1932 Professor of English Literature, University of California, Berkeley
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