Angels on the Edge of the World. By Kathy Lavezzo. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2006. Pp. xvi + 191. $29.95

Various literary accounts of nationalism constitute, as Bruce Holsinger recently noted, "one the most fertile and innovative subfields…in our discipline, generating a wealth" of scholarship characterized "by its wide-ranging historical sensibility and its methodological rigor" (MLQ, 66 [2005], 120). Kathy Lavezzo's new book, Angels on the Edge of the World, is no exception, offering a lucid and compelling account of England's longstanding sense of itself as, quite literally, at the world's edge. Throughout this well-written 144-page study, Lavezzo is keen to show how England's documented sense of its own marginal status functioned both productively and ambivalently. On the one hand England, remarkably, devoted considerable resources to map-making: "It was," she evocatively reminds us, "the island deemed to be beyond the world that most often made images of that world during the Middle Ages" (p. 46). On the other, England's otherwordliness proved a source for anxieties of barbarism as well as for triumphalist geographies of England's special status, an anxious singularity that would propel certain iterations of that nation's imperial ambitions.

Patricia Clare Ingham
Indiana University