Recent Studies in Seventeenth-Century Literary Republicanism

Author: Reid Barbour

Source: English Literary Renaissance, Volume 34, Number 3, November 2004 , pp. 387-417(31)

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Abstract:

“Recent Studies in Seventeenth-Century Literary Republicanism.” Reid Barbour. Scholarship concerning 17th-century republicanism has flourished during the last few decades. This prosperity derives from several tendencies: the movement to a rigorous and evidentiary historicism that the New Historicism has been accused of shortchanging; a response to the clarion call of intellectual and literary historians for a convergence among the analyses of ideas and of rhetoric (especially as exemplified by the work of David Norbrook, Annabel Patterson, Nigel Smith, Markku Peltonen, J. G. A. Pocock, and Quentin Skinner); and, in some cases, the critic's intention to intervene in contemporary political culture. Whereas some intellectual historians (among them, Skinner himself) have begun to express dissatisfaction with republicanism as a key term, literary critics—thanks in large part to Norbrook's 1999 Writing the English Republic—are beginning more fully to trace and more cogently to assess the legacy of republican attitudes and poetics before, during, and after the Civil War. Studies in republicanism, more or less strictly defined, have been richly complemented by new work on early modern pamphleteering, on the drama's critique of tyranny, and on the political orientations of Renaissance classicism. Familiar writers—Milton and Marvell in particular—have been well served by this burgeoning of interest in literary republicanism. Other republican writers and texts have been recovered and published for the first time. Indeed, one clear sign of vibrancy in the field of English literary republicanism is the spate of major editions--either recently published (in the case of Marvell's poetry and prose) or forthcoming (in the case of Lucy Hutchinson). [R. B.]

Document Type: Research article

DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.0013-8312.2004.00049.x

Affiliations: 1: University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Publication date: 2004-11-01

Recent Studies in Seventeenth-Century Literary Republicanism

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