Description
Book SynopsisThe early modern period in Britain was defined by tremendous upheaval - the upending of monarchy, the unsettling of church doctrine, and the pursuit of a new method of inquiry based on an inductive experimental model. Political Turmoil: Early Modern Literature in Transition, 16231660 offers an innovative and ambitious re-appraisal of seventeenth-century British literature and history. Each of the contributors attempts to address the ''how'' and ''why'' of aesthetic change by focusing on political and cultural transformations. Instead of forging a grand narrative of continuity, the contributors attempt to piece together the often complex web of factors and events that contributed to developments in literary form and matter - as well as the social and religious changes that literature sometimes helped to occasion. These twenty chapters, reading across traditional periodization, demonstrate that early modern literary works - when they were conceived, as they were created, and after they c
Trade Review'Political Turmoil is remarkable for its engagement with multiple discourses. Its thoughtfully arranged chapters … are uniformly well-written, occasionally revelatory, and very much in conversation across the volume. This book will prove accessible to advanced undergraduates, yet useful to both generalists and experts in early modern literature. It should be on the shelves of every academic library and considered for any graduate or advanced undergraduate course in early modern literature.' Wendy Furman-Adams, Modern Philology
Table of ContentsIntroduction: turmoil, political and otherwise; Part I. Generic Transitions: 1. Writing the self Sharon Cadman Seelig; 2. Changing places and transitional spaces: plays, masques, and performances Julie Sanders; 3. Erotic and devotional verse Stephen Guy-Bray; 4. Kingdoms of the mind: epic forms, fragments, and translations Anthony Welch; 5. 'Useful' books and mobile poems Randall Ingram; Part II. Literature and Ideological Transformation: 6. The symbolism of anti-Calvinism John Rumrich; 7. Royalist writing and the trope of prison Jerome de Groot; 8. Shakespearean constitutions: literary culture and republicanism Nicholas McDowell; 9. 'The best of texts': the death of Charles I Stephen B. Dobranski; 10. A British Caesar? Representations of Oliver Cromwell Laura Knoppers; Part III. Literature and Cultural Transformation: 11. An 'Amsterdamnified' public sphere: English newsbooks, pamphleteering and polemic in European context Jason Peacey; 12. Affected and disaffected alike: women, print, and the problem of women's literary history Lara Dodds; 13. Imagining the scientific revolution in England Katherine Calloway; 14. Revitalizing nation and mind: the failed promise of seventeenth-century educational reform Todd Butler; 15. The end of friendship Gregory Chaplin; Part IV. Literature and Local Transformation: 16. Country matters Verena Olejniczak Lobsien; 17. Life during wartime: the writing of civil war London Christopher D'Addario; 18. Nations in question: writing Scotland and Ireland James Loxley; 19. England, neo-Latin, and the continental journey Estelle Haan; 20. Global commerce and an emergent 'empire of trade' Stephen Deng.
