Description
Book SynopsisA study of romance, religion, and politics in seventeenth-century England, presenting a recontextualized understanding of romance as a multi-generic narrative structure or strategy rather than a prose genre.
Trade Review“Right Romance will change how critics understand seventeenth-century English romance and its political investments. It challenges long-held opinions about canonical writers such as John Milton and brings into the conversation lesser-known pamphlets and the voices of early modern women writers. The book stresses the power of romance to nourish identity—whether personal, religious, Royalist, or Puritan—and to foster heroic narratives amongst newly elect communities despite national crisis, division, disappointment, suffering, and wandering.”
—Tiffany Jo Werth,author of The Fabulous Dark Cloister: Romance in England After the Reformation
Table of ContentsAcknowledgments
Introduction: Getting Romance Right
1. Protestant Re-visions of Romance: Philip Sidney’s New Arcadia and Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene
2. “Heroical” Histories: Writing Lives into National Romance, 1648–1670
3. The Fall and the Pinnacle: Milton’s Righting of Romance in Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained
4. “My Victorious Triumphs Are All Thine”: The Politics of Love and Elect Community in Lucy Hutchinson’s Order and Disorder
5. “In the Next World”: John Bunyan, Aphra Behn, and the Imitation of Romance
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Index
