Nicholas McDowell – författare

The Oxford Handbook of English Prose, 1640-1714 is the most wide-ranging overview available of prose writing in English during one of the most tumultuous periods in British and Irish history. Stretching from the outbreak of the English Civil Wars to the death of Queen Anne, the last Stuart monarch, the volume is unprecedented in the breadth of its coverage of an age in which prose moved from the margins of cultural life in Britain to its centre. The volume also breaks new ground in the diversity of the prose writing it covers: its thirty-six chapters by an array of established literary critics and historians capture the excitingly multiple forms that prose took in what was a golden age for non-fictional writing, but which also saw the emergence of modes of prose fiction that became part of the origin story of the eighteenth-century novel. This Handbook reflects that multiplicity and diversity in its structure. Four longer introductory chapters map the changing contexts of the publication and reception of prose in the period, as well as the influence of the classical heritage and the role of relations with continental Europe. The subsequent thirty-two chapters are organized by different categories of prose writing. The contributors approach key authors and texts from various and often unconventional perspectives. The volume offers coverage of well-known writers and texts while also capturing the assortment of prose writing in a time of rapid political and social change: there are chapters on, for example, 'Bites and Shams'; 'Circulation Narratives'; 'Keys'; 'Pornography'; 'Recipe Books'; 'True Accounts', and even 'Handbooks'.

Four hundred years after his birth, John Milton remains one of the greatest and most controversial figures in English literature. The Oxford Handbook of Milton is a comprehensive guide to the state of Milton studies in the early twenty-first century, bringing together an international team of thirty-five leading scholars in one volume. The rise of critical interest in Milton's political and religious ideas is the most striking aspect of Milton studies in recent times, a consequence in great part of the increasingly fluid relations between literary and historical study. The Oxford Handbook both embodies the interest in Milton's political and religious contexts in the last generation and seeks to inaugurate a new phase in Milton studies through closer integration of the poetry and prose. There are eight essays on various aspects of Paradise Lost, ranging from its classical background and poetic form to its heretical theology and representation of God. There are sections devoted both to the shorter poems, including 'Lycidas' and Comus, and the final poems, Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes. There are also three sections on Milton's prose: the early controversial works on church government, divorce, and toleration, including Areopagitica; the regicide and republican prose of 1649-1660, the period during which he served as the chief propagandist for the English Commonwealth and Cromwell's Protectorate, and the various writings on education, history, and theology. The opening essays explore what we know about Milton's biography and what it might tell us; the final essays offer interpretations of aspects of Milton's massive influence on later writers, including the Romantic poets.

This is the fourth volume to be published in Oxford's 11-volume edition of the Complete Works of John Milton, the first complete scholarly edition for nearly 100 years. It brings together (for the first time in a single volume) Milton's English writing in prose on the political issues that exercised him throughout his life - civil and religious liberty, republicanism and the constitution of a free commonwealth, the rights and duties of citizens, resistance of tyranny and the role of military force in securing national stability. The eleven pieces here presented in chronological order, from The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates (1649) to Milton's last prose work, his translation of the proclamation announcing the election of John Sobieski as King of Poland (1674), articulate his responses to the unprecedented events of the seventeenth century - civil war, regicide, the Commonwealth, Cromwellian rule, the Restoration of monarchy and the restored Stuart regime -- events which shaped the social, political and religious structures of modern Britain. They do so with unrivalled polemical and rhetorical skill, instinct with revolutionary fervour and political idealism.Each title is freshly edited from newly examined and collated copies of either the first and subsequent seventeenth-century editions or of the manuscript record to give the most accurate and authoritative texts. A headnote to each analyses and discusses (often with new evidence) its composition, production and reception. A very substantial general introduction sets the writings in the context of European intellectual history and of contemporary British controversy and polemic. References and allusions to events and to texts are elucidated by full and detailed annotation and commentary which takes full account of recent Milton scholarship but also often draws on original research. Taken together, these features constitute the definitive edition of these texts for the 21st century. Both editors are established seventeenth-century scholars with expertise particularly in the political and religious literature of the Civil War, Interregnum and Restoration periods.

The English Radical Imagination addresses current critical assumptions about the nature of radical thought and expression during the English Revolution. Through a combination of biographical and literary interpretation, it revises the representation of radical writers in this period as ignorant and uneducated 'tub preachers'. This representation has become a critical orthodoxy since Christopher Hill's seminal study, The World Turned Upside Down (1972). Despite the reservations of so-called 'revisionist' historians about the misleading implications of Hill's work, cultural historians and literary critics have continued to view radical texts as authentic artefacts of a form of early modern popular culture. This book challenges the divide between 'elite' and 'popular' culture in the seventeenth century. While research has revealed that the rank and file of the more organized radical movements was composed of the lower 'middling sort' of people who had little or no access to the elite intellectual culture of the period, some of the most important and most discussed radical writers had been to university in the 1620s and 1630s. Chapters 1-2 investigate how critics - especially those sympathetic to the radicals - have tended to repeat hostile contemporary stereotypes of the ideologists and publicists of radicalism as 'illiterate Mechanick persons'. The failure to recognize the elite cultural background of these writers has resulted in a failure to acknowledge the range of their intellectual and rhetorical resources and, consequently, in a misrepresentation of the sophistication of both their ideas and their writing. Chapters 3-5 are case studies of some of the most important and innovative radical writers. They show how these writers use their experience of an orthodox humanist education for the purposes of satire and ridicule and how they interpret texts associated with orthodox ideologies and cultural practices to produce heterodox arguments. Radical prose of the English Revolution thus emerges as a more complex literary phenomenon than has hitherto been supposed, lending substance to recent claims for its admission to the traditional literary canon.

This book is about the things which could unite, rather than divide, poets during the English Civil Wars: friendship, patronage relations, literary admiration, and anti-clericalism. The central figure is Andrew Marvell, renowned for his 'ambivalent' allegiance in the late 1640s. Little is known about Marvell's associations in this period, when many of his best-known lyrics were composed. The London literary circle which formed in 1647 under the patronage of the wealthy royalist Thomas Stanley included 'Cavalier' friends of Marvell such as Richard Lovelace but also John Hall, a Parliamentarian propagandist inspired by reading Milton. Marvell is placed in the context of Stanley's impressive circle of friends and their efforts to develop English lyric capability in the absence of traditional court patronage. By recovering the cultural values that were shared by Marvell and the like-minded men with whom he moved in the literary circles of post-war London, we are more likely to find the reasons for their decisions about political allegiance. By focusing on a circle of friends and associates we can also get a sense of how they communicated with and influenced one another through their verse. There are innovative readings of Milton's sonnets and Lovelace's lyric verse, while new light is shed on the origins and audience not only of Marvell's early political poems, including the 'Horatian Ode', but lyrics such as 'To His Coy Mistress'.

Four hundred years after his birth, John Milton remains one of the greatest and most controversial figures in English literature. The Oxford Handbook of Milton is a comprehensive guide to the state of Milton studies in the early twenty-first century, bringing together an international team of thirty-five leading scholars in one volume. The rise of critical interest in Milton's political and religious ideas is the most striking aspect of Milton studies in recent times, a consequence in great part of the increasingly fluid relations between literary and historical study. The Handbook both embodies the interest in Milton's political and religious contexts in the last generation and seeks to inaugurate a new phase in Milton studies through closer integration of the poetry and prose. There are eight essays on various aspects of Paradise Lost, ranging from its classical background and poetic form to its heretical theology and representation of God. There are sections devoted both to the shorter poems, including 'Lycidas' and Comus, and the final poems, Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes. There are also three sections on Milton's prose: the early controversial works on church government, divorce, and toleration, including Areopagitica; the regicide and republican prose of 1649-1660, the period during which he served as the chief propagandist for the English Commonwealth and Cromwell's Protectorate, and the various writings on education, history, and theology. The opening essays explore what we know about Milton's biography and what it might tell us; the final essays offer interpretations of aspects of Milton's massive influence on later writers, including the Romantic poets.

A groundbreaking biography of Milton’s formative years that provides a new account of the poet’s political radicalizationJohn Milton (1608–1674) has a unique claim on literary and intellectual history as the author of both Paradise Lost, the greatest narrative poem in English, and prose defences of the execution of Charles I that influenced the French and American revolutions. Tracing Milton’s literary, intellectual, and political development with unprecedented depth and understanding, Poet of Revolution is an unmatched biographical account of the formation of the mind that would go on to create Paradise Lost—but would first justify the killing of a king.Biographers of Milton have always struggled to explain how the young poet became a notorious defender of regicide and other radical ideas such as freedom of the press, religious toleration, and republicanism. In this groundbreaking intellectual biography of Milton’s formative years, Nicholas McDowell draws on recent archival discoveries to reconcile at last the poet and polemicist. He charts Milton’s development from his earliest days as a London schoolboy, through his university life and travels in Italy, to his emergence as a public writer during the English Civil War. At the same time, McDowell presents fresh, richly contextual readings of Milton’s best-known works from this period, including the “Nativity Ode,” “L’Allegro” and “Il Penseroso,” Comus, and “Lycidas.”Challenging biographers who claim that Milton was always a secret radical, Poet of Revolution shows how the events that provoked civil war in England combined with Milton’s astonishing programme of self-education to instil the beliefs that would shape not only his political prose but also his later epic masterpiece.

How the seventeenth-century translations of notoriously obscene tales by Rabelais shaped some of the great works of eighteenth-century English fictionFrançois Rabelais’s Gargantua and Pantagruel—loosely related tales of gluttonous, drunken giants and their fantastic adventures—was one of the most notorious works of Renaissance Europe, condemned by both the Roman Catholic Church and the Protestant reformer John Calvin as obscene and irreligious. In Elizabethan and early Stuart England, familiarity with Rabelais signaled membership in a cosmopolitan elite. But it was only with the seventeenth-century translations of Gargantua and Pantagruel by the eccentric Scottish laird Sir Thomas Urquhart and the Huguenot refugee Peter Motteux that Rabelaisian comedy became fully a part of English literature. In Comic Enlightenment, Nicholas McDowell reconstructs the cultural and political contexts of Urquhart and Motteux’s work during the Civil Wars and Restoration and shows how this palimpsest of translations, notes and commentary influenced the development of satire and fiction in Britain and an emergent Anglo-Irish literary culture.Challenging conventional accounts of the origins of the English novel, McDowell offers extensive new interpretations of landmark literary works of the eighteenth century, including Jonathan Swift’s A Tale of a Tub and Gulliver’s Travels and Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy. McDowell’s ambitious and sweeping account shows how the “Rabelaisian” became part of novelistic currency through the long history of translation and imitation of Rabelais’s works.

How the seventeenth-century translations of notoriously obscene tales by Rabelais shaped some of the great works of eighteenth-century English fictionFrançois Rabelais’s Gargantua and Pantagruel—loosely related tales of gluttonous, drunken giants and their fantastic adventures—was one of the most notorious works of Renaissance Europe, condemned by both the Roman Catholic Church and the Protestant reformer John Calvin as obscene and irreligious. In Elizabethan and early Stuart England, familiarity with Rabelais signaled membership in a cosmopolitan elite. But it was only with the seventeenth-century translations of Gargantua and Pantagruel by the eccentric Scottish laird Sir Thomas Urquhart and the Huguenot refugee Peter Motteux that Rabelaisian comedy became fully a part of English literature. In Comic Enlightenment, Nicholas McDowell reconstructs the cultural and political contexts of Urquhart and Motteux’s work during the Civil Wars and Restoration and shows how this palimpsest of translations, notes and commentary influenced the development of satire and fiction in Britain and an emergent Anglo-Irish literary culture.Challenging conventional accounts of the origins of the English novel, McDowell offers extensive new interpretations of landmark literary works of the eighteenth century, including Jonathan Swift’s A Tale of a Tub and Gulliver’s Travels and Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy. McDowell’s ambitious and sweeping account shows how the “Rabelaisian” became part of novelistic currency through the long history of translation and imitation of Rabelais’s works.