Writing the English Republic: Poetry, Rhetoric and Politics, 1627-1660 Book

According to many historians, the Civil War which engulfed England in 1642 and which culminated in the execution of King Charles I in 1649, was an aberrant eruption of republican zealousness, completely out of keeping with the tolerant, benignly monarchical "middle way" of English political life. As an incomplete bourgeois revolution, The Civil War has even been blamed for stifling the development of a truly democratic civil society in England; as David Norbrook points out in Writing the English Republic: Poetry, Rhetoric and Politics, 1627-1660, "the reform group Charter 88 is making demands that were voiced by the Levellers in the 1640s". Not surprisingly, Norbrook proceeds to argue that the Civil War was no aberration, but drew on a long and distinguished tradition of republican thinking, a tradition which Norbrook also claims was by no means destroyed by the Restoration of 1660. But as the book's subtitle suggests, this is not just an attempt to recover the lost history of radical republican thought within English political culture. It is also a profoundly original study of the ways in which a range of poets of the period criticised the authority of the king and then attempted to offer a vision of a possible future for the republic. As well as offering compelling new readings of Marvell and Milton, Norbrook also recovers the lost poetic voice of the period--Thomas May, Henry Marten, George Wither, John Hall and Payne Fisher. Characterised by Norbrook's usual critical perceptiveness, the book weaves together a history of the period with a persuasive account of its radical literary culture. Writing the English Republic is destined to become a classic study in the "wars of truth" over one of the most turbulent periods in modern English history. --Jerry Brotton Read More