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"Politics and literature Great Britain History 17th century."
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Censorship and Conflict in Seventeenth-Century England
Censorship profoundly affected early modern writing.
Censorship and Conflict in Seventeenth-Century England
offers a detailed picture of early modern censorship and
investigates the pressures that censorship exerted on
seventeenth-century authors, printers, and publishers. In the
1600s, Britain witnessed a civil war, the judicial execution of a
king, the restoration of his son, and an unremitting struggle among
crown, parliament, and people for sovereignty and the right to
define \"liberty and property.\" This battle, sometimes subtle,
sometimes bloody, entailed a struggle for the control of language
and representation. Robertson offers a richly detailed study of
this \"censorship contest\" and of the craft that writers employed to
outflank the licensers. He argues that for most parties, victory,
not diplomacy or consensus, was the ultimate goal. This book
differs from most recent works in analyzing both the mechanics of
early modern censorship and the poetics that the licensing system
produced-the forms and pressures of self-censorship. Among the
issues that Robertson addresses in this book are the workings of
the licensing machinery, the designs of art and obliquity under a
regime of censorship, and the involutions of authorship attendant
on anonymity.
eBook
Wayward contracts : the crisis of political obligation in England, 1640-1674
This is an account of the emergence and cultural significance of contract theory in early modern England. Drawing on literary and political text the author argues that it was at the heart of a struggle over the role of language and representation in inducing voluntary subjection to political authority.
Book
Politicians and Pamphleteers
The English civil wars radically altered many aspects of mid-seventeenth century life, simultaneously creating a period of intense uncertainty and unheralded opportunity. Nowhere was this more apparent than in the printing and publishing industry, which between 1640 and 1660 produced a vast number of tracts and pamphlets on a bewildering variety of subjects. Many of these where of a highly political nature, the publication of which would have been unthinkable just a few years before. Whilst scholars have long recognised the importance of these publications, and have studied in depth what was written in them, much less work has been done on why they were produced. In this book Dr Peacey first highlights the different dynamics at work in the conception, publication and distribution of polemical works, and then pulls the strands together to study them against the wider political context. In so doing he provides a more complete understanding of the relationship between political events and literary and intellectual prose in an era of unrest and upheaval. By incorporating into the political history of the period some of the approaches utilized by scholars of book history, this study reveals the heightened importance of print in both the lives of members of the political nation and the minds of the political elite in the civil wars and Interregnum. Furthermore, it demonstrates both the existence and prevalence of print propaganda with which politicians became associated, and traces the processes by which it came to be produced, the means of detecting its existence, the ways in which politicians involved themselves in its production, the uses to which it was put, and the relationships between politicians and propagandists.
Contents: Introduction; Part 1 The Motor of Propaganda: Politicians and the propaganda impulse; Authors and the propaganda impulse. Part 2 The Mechanics of Propaganda: Decoding pamphlets; Licensing and propaganda; Politicians and the press; Politicians and the writing process. Part 3 The Dynamics of Propaganda: The limits of propaganda; The propagandist and the politician. Epilogue: Propaganda, the state, and the public sphere; Bibliography; Index.
eBook
Perspectives on English Revolutionary Republicanism
Perspectives on English Revolutionary Republicanism takes stock of developments in the scholarship of seventeenth-century English republicanism by looking at the movements and schools of thought that have shaped the field over the decades: the linguistic turn, the cultural turn and the religious turn. While scholars of seventeenth-century republicanism share their enthusiasm for their field, they have approached their subject in diverse ways. The contributors to the present volume have taken the opportunity to bring these approaches together in a number of case studies covering republican language, republican literary and political culture, and republican religion, to paint a lively picture of the state of the art in republican scholarship. The volume begins with three chapters influenced by the theory and methodology of the linguistic turn, before moving on to address cultural history approaches to English republicanism, including both literary culture and (practical) political culture. The final section of the volume looks at how religion intersected with ideas of republican thought. Taken together the essays demonstrate the vitality and diversity of what was once regarded as a narrow topic of political research.
eBook
Bold conscience : Luther to Shakespeare to Milton
How the conscience in early modern England emerged as a fulcrum for public action
Bold Conscience chronicles the shifting conception of conscience in early modern England, as it evolved from a faculty of restraint—what Shakespeare labels “coward conscience”—to one of bold and forthright self-assertion. The concept of conscience played an important role in post-Reformation England, from clerical leaders to laymen, not least because of its central place in determining loyalties during the English Civil War and the regicide of King Charles I. Yet the most complex and lasting perspectives on conscience emerged from deliberately literary voices—William Shakespeare, John Donne, and John Milton.
Joshua Held argues that literary texts by these authors transform the idea of conscience as a private, shameful state to one of boldness fit for navigating both royal power and common dissent in the public realm. Held tracks the increasing political power of conscience from Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Henry VIII to Donne’s court sermons and Milton’s Areopagitica , showing finally that in Paradise Lost , Milton roots boldness in the inner paradise of a pure, common conscience.
Applying a fine-grain analysis to literary England from about 1601 to 1667, this study also looks back to the 1520s, to Luther’s theological foundations of the concept, and forward to 1689, to Locke’s transformation of the idea alongside the term “consciousness.” Ultimately, Held’s study shows how conscience emerges at once as a bulwark against absolute sovereignty and as a stronghold of personal certainty.
eBook
The last Plantagenet consorts : gender, genre, and historiography, 1440-1627
\"Most modern accounts of fifteenth-century queens understandably focus on separating what really happened from what was fabricated. What has not been considered in any detail, however, is the fabrications themselves as narratives, and as reflections of questions and anxieties that haunted their writers. By focusing on the relationship between gender and genre and the way embedded literary narratives echo across texts as disparate as chronicles, parliamentary proceedings, diplomatic correspondence, ballads, poetry, and drama, this study reveals hitherto unexplored tensions within these texts, generated by embedded narratives and their implications\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
Women writers and public debate in 17th-century Britain
This book reveals women writers' key role in constituting seventeenth-century public culture and, in doing so, offers a new reading of that culture as begun in intimate circles of private dialogue and extended along transnational networks of public debate.
eBook