James Holstun (ed.) – Pamphlet Wars, Prose in the English Revolution
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James Holstun (ed.) - Pamphlet Wars, Prose in the English Revolution
[Frank Cass 1992] buy used at abebooks.co.uk If you use this link to purchase this item breviary stuff will receive 5% commission Throughout the English revolutionary period of 1642-60, the press was at least as important a site of conflict as Parliament, the pulpit, and the battlefield. In the 20 years following the de facto breakdown of censorship in the early 1640s, and unprecedented number of men and women of all classes found their way into print. British presses produced a flood of more than 20,000 books and pamphlets, almost all of them prose: satires, sermons, almanacs, newsbooks, prophecies, autobiographies, works of political and religious polemic and theory. The result was the birth of a new public sphere of publication and debate that permanently transformed Anglo-American literary culture. None the less, the period continues to be one of the most neglected episodes in the cultural history of early modern Britain. Pamphlet Wars is the first collection of literary critical essays on the prose imagination of the English Revolution. All nine authors focus on language and literature in the new revolutionary public sphere, but they examine an unusually wide array of works and writers. These range from Royalist satires on sectarian "Babel" to accounts of Ranters' street theatre and the Diggers agrarian communism, from Clarendon's construction of a new public identity for Charles to the public self-fashioning of radical women prophets and petitioners, from Roger Williams, to Henry Marten, to Henry Neville, to later reflections on the English Revolution by Burke and Coleridge. Contents
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