"Most English literary criticism assumes that its object achieved a metropolitan status well before it actually did: in fact, English-language writers had to negotiate a long, slow, and self-doubting rise out of provincial subordination. Before the Empire of English shows that English-language writers of the long eighteenth century were all too aware of their provinciality within the wider European world of culture, which they sought to overcome by articulating a cultural nationalist poetics and by indulging in compensatory imperial ambitions. By examining the "progress of English" theme in poetry, the eighteenth-century notion of the republic of letters, and the poetics of the Augustan period, the book challenges narratives about the emergence and character of cultural nationalist investments in the British world, and by dismantling unexamined assumptions of metropolitan centrality, it contributes to a new, postcolonial understanding of English literary and cultural history."--BOOK JACKET.