Although Milton's three major poems, Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained, and Samson Agonistes, appeared well into the Restoration era, they have long been regarded as belonging philosophically to the earlier seventeenth century. The canonical view is of Milton as a relic in the Restoration - either belated humanist or belated Puritan. Addressing this long-standing anomaly of literary history, Historicizing Milton shows how Milton's major poems respond specifically and powerfully to royalist spectacles of the 1660s and 1670s, spectacles that were intended as displays of divinely approved monarchical power." "Laura Lunger Knoppers traces such public spectacles as the execution of the regicides, the exhumation of Cromwell, the punishment of fifth monarchists, and the coronation triumph of Charles II. Drawing on a range of sources, including letters, diaries, newspaper accounts, sermons, royal proclamations, and parliamentary accounts, Knoppers reconstructs the discourses that interpreted and contested spectacles of power and punishment. Milton's poems are part of this oppositional discourse, Knoppers argues, and his revisions of such key terms as martyrdom, treason, joy, glory, and conquest boldly and defiantly challenge the spectacles by which the monarchy constituted and conveyed its power. Questioning the nature of earthly spectacle altogether, Milton rewrites display as inner witness before God alone. His radically iconoclastic art creates a mode of antispectacle, not only exposing but also redefining and appropriating the spectacles of state."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved
Beginning with the last years of the reign of Elizabeth I and ending late in the seventeenth century, this volume traces the growth of the literary marketplace, the development of poetic genres, and the participation of different writers in a century of poetic continuity, change, and transformation.
Ways of the World explores cosmopolitanism as it emerged during the Restoration and the role theater played in both memorializing and satirizing its implications and consequences. Rooted in the Stuart ambition to raise the status of England through two crucial investments—global traffic, including the slave trade, and cultural sophistication—this intensified global orientation led to the creation of global mercantile networks and to the rise of an urban British elite who drank Ethiopian coffee out of Asian porcelain at Ottoman-inspired coffeehouses. Restoration drama exposed cosmopolitanism's most embarrassing and troubling aspects, with such writers as Joseph Addison, Aphra Behn, John Dryden, and William Wycherley dramatizing the emotional and ethical dilemmas that imperial and commercial expansion brought to light. Altering standard narratives about Restoration drama, Laura J. Rosenthal shows how the reinvention of theater in this period—including technical innovations and the introduction of female performers—helped make possible performances that held the actions of the nation up for scrutiny, simultaneously indulging and ridiculing the violence and exploitation being perpetuated. In doing so, Ways of the World reveals an otherwise elusive consistency between Restoration genres (comedy, tragedy, heroic plays, and tragicomedy), disrupts conventional understandings of the rise and reception of early capitalism, and offers a fresh perspective on theatrical culture in the context of the shifting political realities of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Britain.
This concise and accessible book explores the history of gender in England between 1500 and 1700. Amidst the political and religious disruptions of the Reformation and the Civil War, sexual difference and gender were matters of public debate and private contention. Laura Gowing provides unique insight into gender relations in a time of flux, through sources ranging from the women who tried to vote in Ipswich in 1640, to the dreams of Archbishop Laud and a grandmother describing the first time her grandson wore breeches. Examining gender relations in the contexts of the body, the house, the neighbourhood and the political world, this comprehensive study analyses the tides of change and the power of custom in a pre-modern world. This book offers: Previously unpublished documents by women and men from all levels of society, ranging from private letters to court cases A critical examination of a new field, reflecting original research and the most recent scholarship In-depth analysis of historical evidence, allowing the reader to reconstruct the hidden histories of women Also including a chronology, who’s who of key figures, guide to further reading and a full-colour plate section, Gender Relations in Early Modern England is ideal for students and interested readers at all levels, providing a diverse range of primary sources and the tools to unlock them.
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