Marshall Grossman - The Seventeenth - Century Literature Handbook

Blackwell Literature Handbooks

This new series offers the student thorough and lively introductions to literary periods, movements, and, in some instances, authors and genres, from Anglo-Saxon to the Postmodern. Each volume is written by a leading specialist to be invitingly accessible and informative. Chapters are devoted to the coverage of cultural context, the provision of brief but detailed biographical essays on the authors concerned, critical coverage of key works, and surveys of themes and topics, together with bibliographies of selected further reading. Students new to a period of study or to a period genre will discover all they need to know to orientate and ground themselves in their studies, in volumes that are as stimulating to read as they are convenient to use.

Published

The Science Fiction Handbook

M. Keith Booker and Anne-Marie Thomas

The Seventeenth-Century Literature Handbook

Marshall Grossman

The Twentieth-Century American Fiction Handbook

Christopher MacGowan

This edition first published 2011

2011 Marshall Grossman

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Grossman, Marshall. The seventeenth-century literature handbook / by Marshall Grossman.

p. cm. (Blackwell guides to literature)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-631-22090-9 (hardcover : alk. paper) ISBN 978-0-631-22091-6 (pbk. : alk. paper)

1. English literature17th centuryHistory and criticism. I. Title.

PR71.G76 2011

820.9004dc22

2010029814

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

This book is published in the following electronic formats: ePDFs 9-781-4443-9011-7; Wiley Online Library

9-781-4443-9009-4; ePub 9-781-4443-9010-0

For Karen

Preface

The seventeenth century is one of the richest periods of literary production in English history. It is bracketed by the plays of Shakespeare at the beginning and the great narrative poems of Milton toward its end. It is also perhaps the most tumultuous period in English history, punctuated by three regime changes: civil war between king and Parliament culminated in the beheading of Charles I and the founding of a republic in 1649; the republic failed, the Stuart dynasty was restored in 1660, and the second Stuart king of the restored monarchy was driven into exile and replaced by his daughter and Dutch son-in-law in 1688. In the larger world of intellectual history, the seventeenth century is the century of Bacon, Galileo, Kepler, and Newton, and in social theory, of Hobbes and Locke.

This book attempts to integrate a coherent narrative of the literary production of seventeenth-century Britain and a succinct account of the historical developments within and against which it took place. It is designed to be used by anyone with an interest in seventeenth-century British literature, either independently or in conjunction with a school or university course. It may be read sequentially or used as reference source in which to look up specific items. The first and longest of its four parts, Texts and Contexts: An Overview, seeks to give as clear an account as possible of what happened, of the sequence of events encountered by a person living at the time, and of the literary representations that accompanied those events. In addition, I try to make comprehensible the pressing issues of the time and to understand the literature in specific relation to them by observing a small selection of tropes, or figures of speech, as they are used differently in different contexts. The Texts and Contexts section endeavors to give a brief literary history of the seventeenth century. It is the heart of this book and reading it through will provide students of seventeenth-century literature with the basic sequence of events around which everything else in the volume may be organized and understood. To integrate the complex social and political history of the seventeenth century with the literary history, I have supplemented the necessary identification of important publications and influential events with an attempt to trace the changing uses to which a few very common rhetorical tropes or figures of speech were put. Most notable among these is the analogy of large social structures with the workings of the body: the metaphor of the body politic, which is itself a variety of the even more comprehensive and commonplace analogy of the macrocosm and the microcosm. That is the expectation that divinely instituted structures observed on one scale will be repeated on all scales, so that the organizations of heaven, the universe, and the human body, of the family, the village, the city, and the nation, will be expected to resemble each other in salient ways. I have written at length elsewhere about the breakdown of this expectation under the pressure of scientific discovery during the course of the seventeenth century. Here I have tried to suggest something of that change by analyzing the changes in the way the body politic is deployed in samples from the beginning, middle, and end of the seventeenth century.

Part 2, Topics in Seventeenth-Century Literature, offers four free-standing chapters on four different aspects of seventeenth-century writing: Aemilia Lanyer and the Gendering of Genre looks at the work of the first middle-class Englishwoman to publish a book of religious verse, asking what her poems might tell us about the gender specificity of the generic conventions she inherited from her male predecessors and contemporaries, and how reading her story might change the way we read his tory. Changing Conventions: Hamlet and The Alchemist provides a more extended look at two important and much studied plays with a view toward understanding why one might feel more modern, even more natural or transparent today than the other. As in the chapter on gender, the idea is to work outward from a few specimen texts toward an understanding of how conventions are established, so that a particular way of representing the world may seem transparent and simple in one time period but opaque and difficult in another. The two concluding essays, Pamphlet Wars: To Kill a King! and Everything Happens Twice return to the intricate interrelationship of political and literary history in the period. They examine the contesting representations of the execution of King Charles I by supporters and opponents of the republican regime, and look at the literary coding and recoding in the rapid give and take of political polemic of a major crisis in the early days of the Stuart dynasty, and the way that crisis the Gunpowder Plot of 1605 was reused and revalued during the Restoration.