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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