The Oxford Handbook of Literature and the English Revolution

by Lunger Knoppers, Laura

• ISBN13: 9780199560608
• ISBN10: 0199560609
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2013-02-07
• Publisher: Oxford University Press

Summary

This Handbook offers a comprehensive introduction and thirty-seven new essays by an international team of literary critics and historians on the writings generated by the tumultuous events of mid-seventeenth-century England. Unprecedented events-civil war, regicide, the abolition of monarchy, proscription of episcopacy, constitutional experiment, and finally the return of monarchy-led to an unprecedented outpouring of texts, including new and transformed literary genres andtechniques. The Handbook provides up-to-date scholarship on current issues as well as historical information, textual analysis, and bibliographical tools to help readers understand and appreciate the bold and indeed revolutionary character of writing in mid-seventeenth-century England. The volume isinnovative in its attention to the literary and aesthetic aspects of a wide range of political and religious writing, as well as in its demonstration of how literary texts register the political pressures of their time. Opening with essential contextual chapters on religion, politics, society, and culture, the largely chronological subsequent chapters analyse particular voices, texts, and genres as they respond to revolutionary events. Attention is given to aesthetic qualities, as well as tobold political and religious ideas, in such writers as James Harrington, Marchamont Nedham, Thomas Hobbes, Gerrard Winstanley, John Lilburne, and Abiezer Coppe. At the same time, the revolutionary political context sheds new light on such well-known literary writers as John Milton, Andrew Marvell,Robert Herrick, Henry Vaughan, William Davenant, John Dryden, Lucy Hutchinson, Margaret Cavendish, and John Bunyan. Overall, the volume provides an indispensable guide to the innovative and exciting texts of the English Revolution and reevaluates its long-term cultural impact.

Author Biography

Laura Lunger Knoppers is Liberal Arts Research Professor of English at the Pennsylvania State University. She has published widely on seventeenth-century British literature, visual culture, politics, and religion, particularly on the works of John Milton.

Table of Contents

Introduction: Critical Framework and Issues

England at Home and in the World

England, Europe, and the English Revolution

Three Kingdoms

British Atlantic World

Political Thought

Religion

Literature, Medicine, and Science

Licensing, censorship, and the book trade

Society and the Roles of Women

Civil Wars

News, Pamphlets, and Public Opinion

Principle and Politics in Milton s Areopagitica

The Personal Rule of Poets: Cavalier Poetry and the English Revolution

Civil War letters and diaries and the rhetoric of experience

Marvell Among the Cavaliers

The Levellers: John Lilburne, Richard Overton, and William Walwyn

Regicide and Republic

Eikon Basilike: The printing, composition, strategy, and impact of the king s book

Nascent Republican Theory in Milton's Regicide Prose

Gerrard Winstanley and the Diggers

Abiezer Coppe and the Ranters

Marchamont Nedham: Polemic, Analysis, Allegiance

The Claims of a Civil Science : Hobbes's Leviathan

Henry Vaughan and Thomas Vaughan: Welsh Anglicanism, Chymick , and the English Revolution

Conversion narratives in Old and New England

Protectorate

Milton s Defences and the Principle of sanior pars

Prophecy and Political Expression in Cromwellian England

Marvell Among the Cromwellians

Countering Anti-theatricality: Davenant and the Drama of the Protectorate

Printed Recipe Books in Medical, Political, and Scientific Contexts

James Harrington s The Commonwealth of Oceana and the Republican Tradition

The Political Ideologies of Revolutionary Prose Romance

Quakers and the Culture of Print in the 1650s

Restoration

The Early Poetry of John Dryden

Thomas N. Corns

Say first, what causea The Origins of Paradise Lost

Acephalous Authority: Satire in Butler, Marvell, and Dryden

The Consolation of Natural Philosophy: Margaret Cavendish and the English Revolution

Family and Commonwealth in the Writings of Lucy Hutchinson

Out of the spoils won in Battel : John Bunyan

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