Political Turmoil: Early Modern British Literature in Transition, 1623–1660: Volume 2 Early Modern Literature in Transition Series

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.

Introduction: turmoil, political and otherwise; Part I. Generic Transitions: 1. Writing the self Sharon Cadman Seelig; 2. Changing places and transitional spaces: plays, masques, and performances Julie Sanders; 3. Erotic and devotional verse Stephen Guy-Bray; 4. Kingdoms of the mind: epic forms, fragments, and translations Anthony Welch; 5. 'Useful' books and mobile poems Randall Ingram; Part II. Literature and Ideological Transformation: 6. The symbolism of anti-Calvinism John Rumrich; 7. Royalist writing and the trope of prison Jerome de Groot; 8. Shakespearean constitutions: literary culture and republicanism Nicholas McDowell; 9. 'The best of texts': the death of Charles I Stephen B. Dobranski; 10. A British Caesar? Representations of Oliver Cromwell Laura Knoppers; Part III. Literature and Cultural Transformation: 11. An 'Amsterdamnified' public sphere: English newsbooks, pamphleteering and polemic in European context Jason Peacey; 12. Affected and disaffected alike: women, print, and the problem of women's literary history Lara Dodds; 13. Imagining the scientific revolution in England Katherine Calloway; 14. Revitalizing nation and mind: the failed promise of seventeenth-century educational reform Todd Butler; 15. The end of friendship Gregory Chaplin; Part IV. Literature and Local Transformation: 16. Country matters Verena Olejniczak Lobsien; 17. Life during wartime: the writing of civil war London Christopher D'Addario; 18. Nations in question: writing Scotland and Ireland James Loxley; 19. England, neo-Latin, and the continental journey Estelle Haan; 20. Global commerce and an emergent 'empire of trade' Stephen Deng.

Stephen B. Dobranski is Distinguished University Professor of early modern literature at Georgia State University. His books include Milton, Authorship, and the Book Trade (Cambridge, 1999), and Readers and Authorship in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 2005), which received the English Studies Award from the South Atlantic Modern Language Association. He also authored A Variorum Commentary on the Poems of John Milton: 'Samson Agonistes' (2009), which received the John T. Shawcross Award from the Milton Society of America. His most recent book is Milton's Visual Imagination: Imagery in 'Paradise Lost' (Cambridge, 2015).