Savage indignation

"Savage indignation, that combination of contempt, disgust, and the hilarity born of frustration and impotence, has driven many to the solace of ink and paper. Writers at wit's end, pushed to the margins by political upheaval during the salad days of the first empire, turned to geography to represent their version of sane thought in a world taken leave of its senses. Across the political spectrum authors invoked the tropes of voyage and new worlds in the hope of making audible what in more familiar, domestic registers had fallen on deaf ears.

John Milton, Aphra Behn, Thomas Southerne, John Arbuthnot, Alexander Pope, Jonathan Swift, and John Gay toward the end of their literary careers and at the limits of their patience employed colonial discourse to address notions that the material reality of the New World had thrown into flux: liberty, equality, slavery, race, property, and pleasure."--Jacket.