A History of Seventeenth-Century Literature outlines significant developments in the English literary tradition between the years 1603 and 1690. An energetic and provocative history of English literature from 1603-1690. Part of the major Blackwell History of English Literature series. Locates seventeenth-century English literature in its social and cultural contexts. Considers the physical conditions of literary production and consumption. Looks at the complex political, religious, cultural and social pressures on seventeenth-century writers. Features close critical engagement with major authors and texts Thomas Corns is a major international authority on Milton, the Caroline Court, and the political literature of the English Civil War and the Interregnum.

Censorship profoundly affected early modern writing. Censorship and Conflict in Seventeenth-Century England offers a detailed picture of early modern censorship and investigates the pressures that censorship exerted on seventeenth-century authors, printers, and publishers. In the 1600s, Britain witnessed a civil war, the judicial execution of a king, the restoration of his son, and an unremitting struggle among crown, parliament, and people for sovereignty and the right to define “liberty and property.” This battle, sometimes subtle, sometimes bloody, entailed a struggle for the control of language and representation. Robertson offers a richly detailed study of this “censorship contest” and of the craft that writers employed to outflank the licensers. He argues that for most parties, victory, not diplomacy or consensus, was the ultimate goal. This book differs from most recent works in analyzing both the mechanics of early modern censorship and the poetics that the licensing system produced—the forms and pressures of self-censorship. Among the issues that Robertson addresses in this book are the workings of the licensing machinery, the designs of art and obliquity under a regime of censorship, and the involutions of authorship attendant on anonymity.

This is the first book-length history of the range of seventeenth-century English prose writing. Roger Pooley's study begins with narrative, ranging from the fiction of Bunyan and Aphra Behn to the biographical and autobiographical work of Aubrey and Pepys. Further sections consider religious prose from the hugely influential Authorised Version to Donne's sermons, the political writing of figures as diverse as Milton, Hobbes, Locke and Marvell, cornucopian texts and the writings of the new scientists from Bacon to Newton. At a time when the boundaries of the `canon' are being increasingly revised, this is not only a major survey of a series of great works of literature, but also a fascinating social history and a guide to understanding the literature of the period as a whole.

This volume brings together new work on the image of the nation and the construction of national identity in English literature of the seventeenth century. The chapters in the collection explore visions of British nationhood in literary works including Michael Drayton and John Selden’s Poly-Olbion and Andrew Marvell’s Horatian Ode, shedding new light on topics ranging from debates over territorial waters and the free seas, to the emergence of hyphenated identities, and the perennial problem of the Picts. Concluding with a survey of recent work in British studies and the history of early modern nationalism, this collection highlights issues of British national identity, cohesion, and disintegration that remain undeniably relevant and topical in the twenty-first century. This book was originally published as a special issue of the journal, The Seventeenth Century.