Download or read book Literature and Politics in Cromwellian England written by Blair Worden and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2007-12-06 with total page 476 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this book the pre-eminent historian of Cromwellian England takes a fresh approach to the literary biography of the two great poets of the Puritan Revolution, John Milton and Andrew Marvell. Blair Worden reconstructs the political contexts within which Milton and Marvell wrote, and reassesses their writings against the background of volatile and dramatic changes of public mood and circumstance. Two figures are shown to have been prominent in their minds. First there is Oliver Cromwell, on whose character and decisions the future of the Puritan Revolution and of the nation rested, and whose ascent the two writers traced and assessed, in both cases with an acute ambivalence. The second is Marchamont Nedham, the pioneering journalist of the civil wars, a close friend of Milton and a man whose writings prove to be intimately linked to Marvell's. The high achievements of Milton and Marvell are shown to belong to world of pressing political debate which Nedham's ephemeral publications helped to shape. The book follows Marvell's transition from royalism to Cromwellianism. In Milton's case we explore the profound effect on his outlook brought by the execution of King Charles I in 1649; his difficult and disillusioning relationship with the successive regimes of the Interregnum; and his attempt to come to terms, in his immortal poetry of the Restoration, with the failure of Puritan rule.
Download or read book God s Instruments written by Blair Worden and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2012-03-22 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Puritan Revolution escaped the control of its creators. The parliamentarians who went to war with Charles I in 1642 did not want or expect the fundamental changes that would follow seven years later: the trial and execution of the king, the abolition of the House of Lords, and the creation of the only republic in English history. There were startling and unexpected developments, too, in religion and ideas: the spread of unorthodox doctrines; the attainment of a wide measure of liberty of conscience; and new thinking about the moral and intellectual bases of politics and society. God's Instruments centres on the principal instrument of radical change, Oliver Cromwell, and on the unfamiliar landscape of the decade he dominated, from the abolition of the monarchy in 1649 to the return of the Stuart dynasty in 1660. Its theme is the relationship between the beliefs or convictions of politicians and their decisions and actions. Blair Worden explores the biblical dimension of Puritan politics; the ways that a belief in the workings of divine providence affected political conduct; Cromwell's commitment to liberty of conscience and his search for godly reformation through educational reform; the constitutional premises of his rule and those of his opponents in the struggle for supremacy between parliamentary and military rule; and the relationship between conceptions of civil and religious liberty. The conflicts Worden reconstructs are placed in the perspective of long-term developments, of which many historians have lost sight. The final chapters turn to the guiding convictions of two writers at the heart of politics, John Milton and the royalist Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon. Material from previously published essays, much of it expanded and extensively revised, comes together with newly written chapters to bring fresh evidence and argument to a period of lively debate and interest.
Download or read book Literature and Politics in Cromwellian England written by Blair Worden and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2007-12-06 with total page 475 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Here is a new approach to the historical study of literature. A leading historian of the English civil wars looks at the writings of the two great poets of the time. John Milton and Andrew Marvell, and relates them as never before to the dramatic developments which brought about the execution of King Charles and the rise of Oliver Cromwell.
Download or read book Literature and the Politics of Family in Seventeenth Century England written by Su Fang Ng and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2007-01-25 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A common literary language linked royal absolutism to radical religion and republicanism in seventeenth-century England. Authors from both sides of the Civil Wars, including Milton, Hobbes, Margaret Cavendish, and the Quakers, adapted the analogy between family and state to support radically different visions of political community. They used family metaphors to debate the limits of political authority, rethink gender roles, and imagine community in a period of social and political upheaval. While critical attention has focused on how the common analogy linking father and king, family and state, bolstered royal and paternal claims to authority and obedience, its meaning was in fact intensely contested. In this wide-ranging study, Su Fang Ng analyses the language and metaphors used to describe the relationship between politics and the family in both literary and political writings and offers a fresh perspective on how seventeenth-century literature reflected as well as influenced political thought.
Download or read book Oliver Cromwell and the Rule of the Puritans in England written by Charles H. Firth and published by Literary Licensing, LLC. This book was released on 2014-03 with total page 578 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This Is A New Release Of The Original 1900 Edition.
Download or read book Politics of Discourse written by Kevin Sharpe and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2024-06-21 with total page 373 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The outstanding essays in this volume explore the interdependency of literature and history in seventeenth-century England. The relation of text to society is examined both as theory and as practice. The theoretical essays explore writing, reading, and the emergence of the aesthetic as historical phenomena of the seventeenth century. Other contributions examine cultural and political practices that fashioned the century: patronage, representations of authority, the socialization of party politics, and fables of power. What is often separated as a distinct sphere of “literature” is returned to the contexts of other cultural and discursive practices. Using the shaping force of history on the imagination and the status of literature as historical evidence, the authors also claim the power of imaginative texts to mold as well as reflect history. Politics of Discourse not only increases our understanding of seventeenth-century England but also advances the study of subjects of interest to cultural critics of all historical periods: genre and canon, the interplay of institution and imagination, and the symbols of power. Contributors: Barbara K. Lewalski Michael McKeon Earl Miner David Norbrook Annabel Patterson J. G. A. Pocock Pocock Mary Ann Radzinowicz Kevin Sharpe Blair Worden Steven N. Zwicker This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1987.
Download or read book A Nation of Change and Novelty written by Christopher Hill and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2023-04-17 with total page 275 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Nation of Change and Novelty (1990) ranges broadly over the political and literary terrain of the seventeenth century, examining the importance of the English Revolution as a decisive event in English and European history. It emphasises the historical significance of the English Revolution, exploring not only its causes but also its long term consequences, basing both in a broad social context and viewing it as a necessary condition of England’s having nurtured the first Industrial Revolution.
Download or read book Oliver Cromwell written by Samuel Gardiner and published by Litres. This book was released on 2021-03-16 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Oliver Cromwell" by Samuel Rawson Gardiner. Published by Good Press. Good Press publishes a wide range of titles that encompasses every genre. From well-known classics & literary fiction and non-fiction to forgotten−or yet undiscovered gems−of world literature, we issue the books that need to be read. Each Good Press edition has been meticulously edited and formatted to boost readability for all e-readers and devices. Our goal is to produce eBooks that are user-friendly and accessible to everyone in a high-quality digital format.
Download or read book Literature Gender and Politics During the English Civil War written by Diane Purkiss and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2005-07-14 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this innovative study, Diane Purkiss illuminates the role of gender in the English Civil War by focusing on ideas of masculinity, rather than on the role of women, which has hitherto received more attention. Historians have tended to emphasise a model of human action in the Civil War based on the idea of the human self as rational animal. Purkiss reveals the irrational ideological forces governing the way seventeenth-century writers understood the state, the monarchy, the battlefield and the epic hero in relation to contested contemporary ideas of masculinity. She analyses the writings of Marvell, Waller, Herrick and the Caroline elegists, as well as in newsbooks and pamphlets, and pays particular attention to Milton's complex responses to the dilemmas of male identity. This study will appeal to scholars of seventeenth-century literature as well as those working in intellectual history and the history of gender.
Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of Literature and the English Revolution written by Laura Lunger Knoppers and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2012-11-29 with total page 744 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book The Royalist Republic written by Helmer J. Helmers and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2015-01-08 with total page 343 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book traces the impact of the English Civil Wars and the resulting support for the royalist cause in the Dutch Republic.
Download or read book Literature and the English Civil War written by Thomas Healy and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1990-05-25 with total page 282 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book charts the relationship between literary texts and their historical context from 1640-1660. Essays in the volume focus on issues of ideology and genre; the politics of the masque; lyric and devotional poetry; women's writings; attitudes towards Ireland; colonialism; madness and division; and individual writers such as Hobbes, Marvell and Milton.
Download or read book Poetry and the Cromwellian Protectorate written by Edward Holberton and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2008-08-07 with total page 262 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Cromwellian Protectorate was a period of innovation in poetry and drama, as well as constitutional debate. This new account of the period focuses on key cultural institutions - Parliament, an embassy to Sweden, Oxford University, Cromwell's state funeral - to examine this poetry's relationship with a culture in transformation and crisis. Edward Holberton shows that the Protectorate's instabilities helped to generate lively and innovative poetry. Protectorate verse explores the fault-lines of a culture which ceaselessly contested the authority of its own institutions, including the office of Protector itself. Poetry by Andrew Marvell, Edmund Waller, William Davenant, and John Dryden, contributed to a vibrant poetic culture which embraced diverse forms and occasions: masques for the weddings of Cromwell's daughters, diplomatic poems to Queen Christina of Sweden, naval victories, civic pageants, and university anthologies in celebration of a peace treaty. Many of these texts prove difficult to align with established ideas of the political and cultural contests of the age, because they become entangled with cultural institutions which could no longer be taken for granted, and were in many cases transforming rapidly, with far-reaching historical consequences. Poetry and the Cromwellian Protectorate asks how poetry confronted questions that were complicated by institutional practices, how poets tried to square their wider cultural sympathies with their interests in a particular parliamentary or university crisis, and how changes in institutions afforded poets critical insights into their society's problems and its place in the world. The readings of this book challenge previous representations of Protectorate culture as a phase of conservative backsliding, or pragmatic compromise, under a quasi-monarchical order. Protectorate verse emerges as nuanced and vital writing, which looks beyond the personality of Oliver Cromwell to the tensions that shaped his power. Poetry and the Cromwellian Protectorate argues that it is precisely through being contingent and compromised that these poems achieve their vitality, and become so revealing.
Download or read book Political Turmoil Early Modern British Literature in Transition 1623 1660 Volume 2 written by Stephen B. Dobranski and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2019-01-31 with total page 738 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The 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, 1623–1660 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 circulated - were, above all, involved in various types of transitions.
Download or read book Politics Religion and Literature in the Seventeenth Century written by William Montgomerie Lamont and published by London : Dent ; Totowa, N.J. : Rowman and Littlefield. This book was released on 1975 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Death of Oliver Cromwell written by H.F. McMains and published by University Press of Kentucky. This book was released on 2014-10-17 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For centuries, rumors have circulated in England that Lord Protector Oliver Cromwell did not die of natural causes. Now, in a fascinating book that reads like a historical whodunit, we have a motive, a means, a murderer (complete with his own deathbed confession), and a supporting cast that includes John Milton and Andrew Marvell. Almost from the moment of Cromwell's death in 1658, writers and biographers have dismissed suspicions of foul play as little more than the result of a powerful person's unexpected demise. They have assumed that at age fifty-nine Cromwell was in generally poor health and that his government's collapse was inevitable. But his family was generally long-lived and, contrary to royalist wishes, his government was becoming established. As the crucial first step toward the restoration of the Stuart monarchy in 1660, his death proved to be a turning point in British history. In a wide-ranging investigation that draws upon the fields of history, toxicology, medical forensics, and literature, H.F. McMains offers a fresh reading of evidence that has sat quietly in libraries and archives for more than two centuries. He examines the development of Cromwell's illness in 1658, analyzes his symptoms, and evaluates persons with motive, method, and opportunity to do him harm. The result is a reassessment of Cromwell's relationship with the English people and their government and a convincing investigation of his mysterious death.
Download or read book The English Civil Wars written by Blair Worden and published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson. This book was released on 2009-11-19 with total page 153 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A brilliant appraisal of the Civil War and its long-term consequences, by an acclaimed historian. The political upheaval of the mid-seventeenth century has no parallel in English history. Other events have changed the occupancy and the powers of the throne, but the conflict of 1640-60 was more dramatic: the monarchy and the House of Lords were abolished, to be replaced by a republic and military rule. In this wonderfully readable account, Blair Worden explores the events of this period and their origins - the war between King and Parliament, the execution of Charles I, Cromwell's rule and the Restoration - while aiming to reveal something more elusive: the motivations of contemporaries on both sides and the concerns of later generations.
