The Oxford Handbook of Literature and the English Revolution

Edited by Laura Lunger Knoppers

Oxford Handbooks

Includes thirty-seven new chapters written by leading international scholars on the issues, contexts, and texts of the English Revolution
Displays an interdisciplinary approach drawing on literature, history, religion, print culture, the history of reading, and women's writing
Chapters engage not only scholarly debates about the causes and effects of the English Revolution, but broader historical and theoretical conversations about propaganda and print history, political opinion and the public sphere, early readers, literary history, history of genres, and women's roles in society
Provides a news lens on the literature of the civil war, situating canonical literary texts in their precise political, religious, and cultural contexts

The Oxford Handbook of Literature and the English Revolution

Edited by Laura Lunger Knoppers

Description

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 and techniques. 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 is innovative 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 to bold 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.

The Oxford Handbook of Literature and the English Revolution

Edited by Laura Lunger Knoppers

Oxford Handbooks

Introduction: Critical Framework and Issues, Laura Lunger Knoppers
PART I: ENGLAND AT HOME AND IN THE WORLD
1. England, Europe, and the English Revolution, Nigel Smith
2. Three Kingdoms, Eamon Darcy
3. British Atlantic World, Carla Gardina Pestana
4. Political Thought, Glenn Burgess
5. Religion, John Coffey
6. Literature, Medicine, and Science, Karen Edwards
7. Licensing, censorship, and the book trade, Jason McElligott
8. Society and the Roles of Women, Ann Hughes
PART II: CIVIL WARS
9. News, Pamphlets, and Public Opinion, Jason Peacey
10. Principle and Politics in Milton s Areopagitica, Stephen B. Dobranski
11. The Personal Rule of Poets: Cavalier Poetry and the English Revolution, Ann Baynes Coiro
12. Civil War letters and diaries and the rhetoric of experience, Helen Wilcox
13. Marvell Among the Cavaliers, Nicholas McDowell
14. The Levellers: John Lilburne, Richard Overton, and William Walwyn, Rachel Foxley
PART III: REGICIDE AND REPUBLIC
15. Eikon Basilike: The printing, composition, strategy, and impact of the king s book, Robert Wilcher
16. Nascent Republican Theory in Milton's Regicide Prose, Stephen M. Fallon
17. Gerrard Winstanley and the Diggers, David Loewenstein
18. Abiezer Coppe and the Ranters, Ariel Hessayon
19. Marchamont Nedham: Polemic, Analysis, Allegiance, Joad Raymond
20. The Claims of a Civil Science : Hobbes's Leviathan, James Loxley
21. Henry Vaughan and Thomas Vaughan: Welsh Anglicanism, Chymick , and the English Revolution, Nigel Smith
22. Conversion narratives in Old and New England, Kathleen Lynch
PART IV: PROTECTORATE
23. Milton s Defences and the Principle of sanior pars, Elizabeth Sauer
24. Prophecy and Political Expression in Cromwellian England, Katharine Gillespie
25. Marvell Among the Cromwellians, Nicholas McDowell
26. Countering Anti-theatricality: Davenant and the Drama of the Protectorate, Janet Clare
27. Printed Recipe Books in Medical, Political, and Scientific Contexts, Elizabeth Spiller
28. James Harrington s The Commonwealth of Oceana and the Republican Tradition, Rachel Hammersley
29. The Political Ideologies of Revolutionary Prose Romance, Amelia Zurcher
30. Quakers and the Culture of Print in the 1650s, Kate Peters
PART V: RESTORATION
31. Lament for a Nationa Milton s Readie and Easie Way and the Turn to Satire
32. The Early Poetry of John Dryden, Thomas N. Corns
33. Say first, what causea The Origins of Paradise Lost
34. Acephalous Authority: Satire in Butler, Marvell, and Dryden, Clement Hawes
35. The Consolation of Natural Philosophy: Margaret Cavendish and the English Revolution, Rachel Trubowitz
36. Family and Commonwealth in the Writings of Lucy Hutchinson, Shannon Miller
37. Out of the spoils won in Battel : John Bunyan, N. H. Keeble

The Oxford Handbook of Literature and the English Revolution

Edited by Laura Lunger Knoppers

Oxford Handbooks

Author Information

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.

Contributors:

Glenn Burgess
Janet Clare
John Coffey
Ann Baynes Coiro
Thomas N. Corns
Eamon Darcy
Stephen B. Dobranski
Karen Edwards
Stephen M. Fallon
Rachel Foxley
Katharine Gillespie
Rachel Hammersley
Clement Hawes
Ariel Hessayon
Ann Hughes
N. H. Keeble
Laura Lunger Knoppers
David Loewenstein
James Loxley
Kathleen Lynch
Nicholas McDowell
Jason McElligott
Shannon Miller
Annabel Patterson
Jason Peacey
Carla Gardina Pestana
Kate Peters
Joad Raymond
Elizabeth Sauer
Elizabeth Spiller
Nigel Smith
Rachel Trubowitz
Robert Wilcher
Helen Wilcox
Amelia Zurcher