Laura Lunger Knoppers

Constructing Cromwell traces the complex and shifting popular images of Oliver Cromwell from his first appearance as a public figure in the mid-1640s through the period of his power to his death and eventual disinterment after the restoration of the monarchy. The meaning and impact of this enigmatic figure has long been debated in the context of mid seventeenth-century crisis but contemporary representations of Cromwell have largely been neglected. Cromwellian print, Laura Knoppers argues, transformed the courtly forms of Caroline ceremony, portraiture and panegyric and in turn complicated and altered the cultural forms available to Charles II. The book draws on extensive archival research, including manuscript sources, startling print ephemera, and visual artefacts. Placing canonical authors such as Milton, Marvell, Waller and Dryden alongside such neglected writers as George Wither and Payne Fisher, Knoppers demonstrates how literary texts both respond and contribute to political and cultural change.

Ceremony, Portrait, and Print 1645-1661

Constructing Cromwell

John Milton

Milton's participation in the history and politics of his time makes his works both exciting and difficult for students and scholars. This volume offers not only a newly-collated, scrupulously-edited old-spelling text of two of Milton's major poems, Paradise Regain'd and Samson Agonistes, but crucial information on the political, religious, print, and publishing milieu in which the poems appeared. New archival materials are used to show howMilton's volume appeared at a time of high tension with repressive measures against dissent, and disaffection with the extravagance of the court of Charles II and with his pro-French foreign policies. While teaching editions have all but ignored the material agents of publication, this edition examines Milton's poems aspart of a radical print network that continued to oppose the restored church and monarchy. Milton's publisher, John Starkey, is shown to be consistently sympathetic with republican and Machiavellian thought. Early readers not only linked Milton's poems with earlier literary texts but read them as commentary on their own times. Again, unlike teaching editions, this volume considers in detail the material process of producing the text and the many contributions made by the publisher andprinting house. This includes for the first time an analysis of the variant spelling as the work of multiple pressmen (or compositors). Finally, extensive notes provide word definitions and classical, biblical, geographical, and historical references helpful for students and scholars alike.

The 1671 Poems: Paradise Regain'd and Samson Agonistes

The Complete Works of John Milton: Volume II

Ideal for courses, this Companion examines the range, historical importance, and aesthetic merit of women's writing in Britain, 1500-1700.

The Cambridge Companion to Early Modern Women's Writing

Knoppers examines the domestic image of the royal family as a contested propaganda tool in the English Revolution and beyond.

Politicizing Domesticity from Henrietta Maria to Milton's Eve

This Handbook presents a comprehensive introduction and thirty-seven new analytical essays on the issues, contexts, and texts of the English Revolution. Offering textual, literary critical, historical, and methodological information, the volume exemplifies new and diverse approaches to revolutionary writing and maps out future avenues of research.

The Oxford Handbook of Literature and the English Revolution

Joan B. Landes

Multi-disciplinary in approach & cross-European in scope, this volume explores links between the political & the monstrous in Europe from the Renaissance to the 19th century. These essays stress the continual reinvention & polemical applications of the monstrous.

Laura Lunger Knoppers

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