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

Early Modern Period in Britain

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 and Literature

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.