Literature, Gender and Politics During the English Civil WarCambridge University Press, 2005 M07 14 - 300 pages In this innovative study, Diane Purkiss illuminates the role of gender in the English Civil War by focusing on ideas of masculinity, rather than on the role of women, which has hitherto received more attention. Historians have tended to emphasise a model of human action in the Civil War based on the idea of the human self as rational animal. Purkiss reveals the irrational ideological forces governing the way seventeenth-century writers understood the state, the monarchy, the battlefield and the epic hero in relation to contested contemporary ideas of masculinity. She analyses the writings of Marvell, Waller, Herrick and the Caroline elegists, as well as in newsbooks and pamphlets, and pays particular attention to Milton's complex responses to the dilemmas of male identity. This study will appeal to scholars of seventeenth-century literature as well as those working in intellectual history and the history of gender. |
Other editions - View all
Literature, Gender and Politics During the English Civil War Diane Purkiss No preview available - 2010 |
Common terms and phrases
abjection anxieties Areopagitica authority battle becomes birth blood boys Cambridge University Press castration Cavaliers chaos Charles Charles's child Clarendon Press court Cromwell Cromwell's nose culture Dalila death desire discourse disorder Early Modern England effeminacy Eikon Basilike elegies Elizabeth English Civil English Civil War excess fantasy father fear female body feminine figure gender godly hath hence Henrietta Maria History Hopkins husband iconoclasm John Milton John Morrill kind king's Kings Cabinet Opened linked London male Marvell Mary masculine identity masculinity maternal body Matthew Hopkins metaphor military Mistress Parliament monarch monster monstrous mother narrative nation Oliver Cromwell Oxford pamphlet Paradise Lost Parliamentarian patrilinearity phallic poem political problematic psychic public sphere Queen regicide Renaissance represent representation republican rhetoric Richard role Routledge Royalist Samson Samson Agonistes satire secret seventeenth-century sexual signifier social soldiers story suggests symbolic texts threat trope truth violence wife witch witchcraft woman womb women wounded
References to this book
Imagining Sex:Pornography and Bodies in Seventeenth-Century England ... Sarah Toulalan No preview available - 2007 |