The English Radical Imagination Culture, Religion, and Revolution, 1630-1660

by McDowell, Nicholas

• ISBN13: 9780199260515
• ISBN10: 0199260516
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2004-01-15
• Publisher: Oxford University Press

Summary

This study addresses current critical assumptions about the nature of radical thought and expression during the English Revolution. Nicholas McDowell challenges the divide between "elite" and "popular" culture in the seventeenth century and argues that the radical writing of the English Revolution is a more complex literary phenomenon than has hitherto been supposed, lending substance to recent claims for its admission to the traditional literary canon.

Author Biography

Nicholas McDowell is Lecturer in Renaissance Literature and Culture, University of Exeter.

Table of Contents

Note on Texts/Abbreviations	viii
1. 'Illiterate Mechanick Persons': Writing, Radicalism, and the Dominant Culture	1	(21)
2. 'Named and Printed Heretics': Literacy, Heterodoxy, and the Cultural Construction of Identity	22	(28)
3. Of Language and Flesh: Power, Pedagogy, and the Intellectual Origins of Leveller Ideas	50	(39)
4. 'In a Lunatick Moode': Humanism, Puritanism, and the Rhetorical Strategies of Ranter Writing	89	(48)
5. Washing in Cabalinus' Well: Quakerism, Scepticism, and Radical Enlightenment	137	(46)
Epilogue: Milton and the Radical Imagination	183	(10)
Bibliography	193	(20)
Index	213