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Familial Forms: Politics and Genealogy in Seventeenth-Century English Literature

Familial Forms: Politics and Genealogy in Seventeenth-Century English Literature

Paperback

Literary Criticism

ISBN10: 1644531542
ISBN13: 9781644531549
Publisher: University of Delaware Press
Published: Dec 9 2010
Pages: 308
Weight: 1.05
Height: 0.69 Width: 6.14 Depth: 9.21
Language: English

Familial Forms is the first full-length study to examine how literary writers engaged the politics of genealogy that helped define the century of revolution. By demonstrating how conflicts over the family-state analogy intersected with the period's battles over succession, including: the ascent of James I, the execution of Charles I, disputes over the terms of the Interregnum government, the Restoration of Charles II, the Exclusion Crisis, the deposition of James II, the ascent of William and Mary, and Anne's failure to produce a surviving heir, this study provides a new map of the seventeenth-century politics of family in England. Beginning with a reconsideration of Jacobean patriarchalism, Familial Forms focuses on the work of John Milton, Lucy Hutchinson, John Dryden, and Mary Astell. From their contrasting political and gendered positions, these authors contemplated and contested the relevance of marriage and kinship to government. Their writing illuminates two crucial elements of England's conflicts. First, the formal qualities of poems and prose tracts reveal that not only was there a competition among different versions of the family-state analogy, but also a competition over its very status as an analogy. Second, through their negotiations of linear and nonlinear forms, Milton, Hutchinson, Dryden, and Astell demonstrate the centrality of temporality to the period's political battles.

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Literary Criticism