Nigel Smith – Literature & Revolution In England, 1640-1660

Nigel Smith - Literature and Revolution In England, 1640-1660 Nigel SmithLiterature & Revolution In England, 1640-1660
[Yale University Press 1997]

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The years of the British Civil War and Interregnum constituted a turning point not only in the political, social, and religious history of seventeenth-century England but also in the use and meaning of English language and literature. At a time of crisis and constitutional turmoil, literature itself acquired new functions and played a dynamic part in the fragmentation of religious and political authority.

Nigel Smith argues that the upheaval in divine and secular authority provided both motive and opportunity for transformations in the nature and meaning of literary expression. The increase in pamphleteering and journalism brought a new awareness of print; with it, existing ideas of authorship and authority collapsed. Through literature, people revised their understanding of themselves and attempted to transform their predicaments.

Smith examines literary output ranging from the masterworks of the age—Milton's Paradise Lost, Hobbes's Leviathan, Marvell's poetry—to a host of less well-known writings. He examines the contents of manuscripts and newspapers sold on the streets, published drama, epics and romances, love poetry, praise poetry, psalms and hymns, satire in prose and verse, fishing manuals, and histories. He also analyzes religious polemic and the language of political controversy, demonstrating how, as literary genres changed, they often acquired new vitality.

Ranging wider than any other work on this period, this highly original book explores the effect of politics on the practice of writing and the impact of literature on patterns of historical change.

Contents

List of Illustrations
Preface
Abbreviations
Note to paperback edition
Introduction: Dissent Refracted: Text, Genre and Society 1640-60

Part I – Writing, Publishing and Reading in the War
Chapter 1 Unstable Parameters
The Conditions of Writing
    Production and Circulation
    Communication and Authority: The Public Sphere
    A New Kind of Author
Style Wars: Forms Confused
    Rhetoric and the Pamphlet Wars
    Representation and Interpreatation
    War Writing
Chapter 2 Public Fora
What is the News?
Theatres Transposed: The Career of Drama in the English Revolution

Part II – Rhetoric, Politics and Religion
Chapter 3 The Meaning of the Centre
Juggling Models: Parliamentary and Monarchical Apology
    The King: In and Out of Parliament
    Absolutely the King
    Posthumously Iconic
The Holy Commonwealth and the Breaking of Forms
    Cement in the Body
    Bishops, Presbyters and Puritans
    Toleration: Cracks in the Mortar
    The Grand Puritan Sublime
    All Alone
Chapter 4 Discourse from Below: The Levellers, the City and the Army
Urban Drama
The Uses of Books
Levellers Republicanised
Chapter 5 Political Theory as Aesthetics: Hobbes, Harrington, Winstanley
Hobbes's Body
Harrington's Commonwealth
'Action is the Life of All'
Chapter 6 The Free State in Letters: Republicanism Comes Out
Approximate Discourses
The Free State Speaks
The Republican Advance

Part III – Mythologising Calamity: Genres in Revolutuion
Chapter 7 Heroic Work
Epic Divides; Heroic Diatribes
    Epics for Civil Wars
    The Heroic Republic
    Creating Interiority
    Prophetic Resolutions
Mr Hobbes in Love: The Quest for Real Romance
    The End of Arcadia
    Interlude and Exile
    French Confessions
    Republican Romance
Chapter 8 The Instrumentality of Lyrics
The Lyric in the Republic
Battle Hymns of the Republic
Two War Genres
    Panegyric
    Elegy
Chapter 9 Satire: Whose Property?
Marprelate Revived
Satire and 'Popular Culture'
A Great Forgetting
Chapter 10 Calamity as Narrative
On the Land: Landscape, Pastoral, Piscatorial
    The View from Up Here
    In the Field, By the Stream
'I was there': History as Imagined Present
    Historiographical Revolutions
    Print, Oratory and the Classics
    Myth-Making

Conclusion
Notes
Index

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