English Literature Abroad

2021 ◽  
pp. 130-157
Author(s):  
Julianne Werlin
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
John Milton ◽  
English Literature ◽  
Direct Result ◽  
Literary Canon ◽  
Colonial Power ◽  
Capitalist Development ◽  
English Revolution ◽  
The Relationship

Beginning in the seventeenth century, English literary authors began to be printed and read in translation in European vernaculars. This chapter traces the relationship between capitalist England’s emergence as an international commercial and colonial power and the circulation of English literature on the Continent. Taking the career of John Milton as a case study, it argues that the English Revolution marked a turning point in England’s political and economic influence, and as a direct result, in the reception of its literature. By the end of the seventeenth century, England’s capitalist development enabled vernacular writers such as Milton, Shakespeare, and Bacon to enter the European literary canon.

The Accommodated Jew

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kathy Lavezzo
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Charles Dickens ◽  
John Milton ◽  
English Literature ◽  
Merchant Of Venice ◽  
Victorian England ◽  
The Merchant Of Venice ◽  
Blood Libel ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
English Culture

England during the Middle Ages was at the forefront of European antisemitism. It was in medieval Norwich that the notorious “blood libel” was first introduced when a resident accused the city's Jewish leaders of abducting and ritually murdering a local boy. This book rethinks the complex and contradictory relation between England's rejection of “the Jew” and the centrality of Jews to classic English literature. Drawing on literary, historical, and cartographic texts, the book charts an entangled Jewish imaginative presence in English culture. It tracks how English writers from Bede to John Milton imagine Jews via buildings—tombs, latrines and especially houses—that support fantasies of exile. Epitomizing this trope is the blood libel and its implication that Jews cannot be accommodated in England because of the anti-Christian violence they allegedly perform in their homes. In the Croxton Play of the Sacrament, Marlowe's The Jew of Malta, and Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice, the Jewish house not only serves as a lethal trap but also as the site of an emerging bourgeoisie incompatible with Christian pieties. In the book's epilogue, the chapters advance the inquiry into Victorian England and the relationship between Charles Dickens (whose Fagin is the second most infamous Jew in English literature after Shylock) and the Jewish couple that purchased his London home, Tavistock House, showing how far relations between gentiles and Jews in England had (and had not) evolved.

Complaints About Avâriz Assessment and Payment in the Avâriz-tax System: An Aspect of the Relationship Between Centre and Periphery. A Case Study of Kayseri, 1618-1700

2003 ◽  
Vol 46 (4) ◽  
pp. 437-474
Author(s):  
Süleyman Demirci
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Ottoman Empire ◽  
Court Cases ◽  
Central Administration ◽  
Common People ◽  
Tax System ◽  
Near Eastern ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Insight Into

AbstractThis paper on complaints about avâriz assessment and payment relies on the şer'iyye sicils of Kayseri. It begins by reviewing the traditional Near Eastern concept of State Justice in conjunction with the archival evidence. By examining the court cases and the imperial orders in these sicils it is possible for us to assess how the Ottoman judicial system and central administration dealt with the complaints and alleged corruption regarding the avâriz levies in the province of Kayseri throughout the seventeenth century. It is also possible to see how common people fought with rising problems in the avâriz system, or how they sought justice, and to what degree they knew what was their legal right and what not by examining the sicils themselves. The result of this examination will help to revise a number of misconceptions regarding complaints in the Ottoman Empire- a study of complaints from the sicils may yield a certain insight into the nature of the relationship between the centre and periphery. Cet article sur les plaintes concernant le calcul et le paiement de l'impôt avâriz est fondé sur les şer'iyye sicils de Kayseri. Il débute par l'étude du concept traditionnel de l'État de Justice au Proche Orient en relation avec les données trouvées dans les archives. En examinant les procès et les ordres impériaux dans ces sicils , il nous sera possible d'établir comment, à la fois le système judiciaire et l'administration centrale de l'Empire ottoman, ont traité les plaintes et la supposée corruption concernant le prélèvement de l'impôt avâriz dans la province de Kayseri tout au long du XVIIème siècle. Il nous sera alors possible, en exploitant les documents contenus dans les sicils, de voir comment la population luttait contre les problèmes croissants dans le système avâriz, comment elle avait recours à la justice et dans quelle mesure elle connaissait ses droits légaux. Les résultats de cette analyse permettront de réviser un certain nombre d'idées fausses à propos des plaintes dans l'Empire ottoman; de même, l'étude de ces plaintes pourra éventuellement donner une certaine idée de la nature des liens entre le centre et la périphérie.

Making Milton’s Bogey

Making Milton ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 157-170
Author(s):  
Lara Dodds
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Women Writers ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Paradise Lost ◽  
Reception History ◽  
Literary Imagination ◽  
Woman Writer ◽  
Literary Canon ◽  
The Relationship

In The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (1979), Gilbert and Gubar posit Milton and Paradise Lost as a ‘bogey’ for women writers. Wittreich’s Feminist Milton (1987) suggests an alternative reception history in which Milton’s poetry provided the basis for a more inclusive literary canon. This chapter re-examines the question of the relationship between Milton’s poetry, primarily Paradise Lost, and women’s literary history through a case study of the poetry of Anne Finch, Countess of Winchilsea (1661–1720). Though Finch acknowledges Milton’s influence explicitly in her blank-verse pastoral ‘Fanscomb Barn’, implicit debts are present throughout Finch’s 1713 Miscellany Poems and the fair-copy manuscript compilation ‘Miscellany Poems with Two Plays by Ardelia’ (1691–1701). The very different status of Milton and his verse in these two contexts illustrates the conflicted legacy of Paradise Lost for women’s literary history.

Introduction

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kathy Lavezzo
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Jewish Identity ◽  
John Milton ◽  
Host Country ◽  
English Literature ◽  
Formal Analysis ◽  
Jewish Diaspora ◽  
Historical Contextualization ◽  
Early English

This book examines texts by English writers from Bede to John Milton that focus on Jews who are accommodated—that is, those who have found lodging in a host country. Insofar as they are accommodated or housed, the Jews depicted in early English texts offer a geography of Jewish identity that departs from what may be a more familiar linkage of Jews and space in antisemitic literature: the Wandering Jew legend. That legend, whose mobile protagonist embodies the territorial upheavals of the Jewish diaspora, only became popular in Europe during the seventeenth century. Before that time, English literature featured not the wandering but the accommodated Jew. The book demonstrates how space both fosters and troubles the antisemitism at work in English texts by engaging in both historical contextualization and close formal analysis of their representation of physical locations. It uses as a conceptual springboard the Hereford world map in order to develop further its methodology.

Legal Agency as Literature in the English Revolution

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nigel Smith
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Civil Wars ◽  
Large Body ◽  
Literary Canon ◽  
Common People ◽  
New Model ◽  
English Revolution ◽  
Internal Politics ◽  
The Common ◽  
Legal Understanding

The literary canon of the mid-seventeenth century has always included works of argument in various spheres—religious, political, philosophical, and juridical—that make up the polemic of the civil wars and the experiment with non-monarchical government that followed. This very large body of usually printed literature was often in the form of a legal plea. One area in which law was reconceived in the name of the common people and exemplified in public and courtroom protest, on the printed page and in the internal politics of the New Model Army, was the Leveller movement, most famously exemplified in the career and expression of John Lilburne. The broader impact of Leveller revisions to legal understanding is exemplified in the activities of the 1650s popular republican and Restoration law publisher John Streater.

scholarly journals E.P. Thompson, Shirley, and the Antinomian Tradition in West Riding Luddism and Popular Protest

2021 ◽  
Vol 86 (2) ◽  
pp. 187-214
Author(s):  
Matthew Roberts
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Charlotte Bronte ◽  
Final Section ◽  
William Blake ◽  
Moral Law ◽  
The West ◽  
Age Of Reason ◽  
The Relationship

The novelist Charlotte Brontë and the historian E.P. Thompson both claimed that the Yorkshire Luddites of the 1810s were Antinomians, descendants of the seventeenth-century radical Christian sects who claimed, as Christ’s elect, that they were not bound by the (moral) law. This article follows a thread that links Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class (in which he made this claim) with his later study of William Blake, Witness against the Beast, which, far from being just an esoteric study of an esoteric figure, uncovered an antinomian tradition that linked the radicalism and protest of the ‘age of reason’ with the seventeenth century. In doing so, it revisits the relationship between Thompson and religion, still an underexplored aspect and too overshadowed by his polemical attacks on Methodism. Having sketched this antinomian tradition, the article then turns to Brontë’s novel Shirley, which recounts the Luddism of the West Riding, and situates it in the context of Thompson’s antinomian tradition, exploring why Brontë chose to present the Luddites as Antinomians. The final section tests the hypothesis of Brontë and Thompson that Luddites may have been Antinomians through a case study of Luddism in the West Riding and the place of religious enthusiasm in working-class protest and culture in the early nineteenth century.

“Such Masculine Strokes”: Aphra Behn as Translator ofA Discovery of New Worlds

1996 ◽  
Vol 28 (2) ◽  
pp. 229-250 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sarah Goodfellow
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Gender Roles ◽  
Natural Philosophy ◽  
Academic Community ◽  
Aphra Behn ◽  
Literary Canon ◽  
Scientific Texts ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Female Audience ◽  
The Relationship

Aphra Behn (1640–89) stands simultaneously at the center and on the edge of Restoration literature. As one of its most prolific writers, her success as a playwright was rivaled only by Dryden; however, as a woman, she defied and challenged contemporary ideas about sex, gender, and authorship. Behn was remarkably aware of the ambiguity of her position; a widow, a writer, and a professional, she inhabited and personified the grey areas of seventeenth-century gender roles. For these reasons, her work provides an interesting window through which to view the relationship between gender and literature in the late seventeenth century.The subject of several book-length studies and many more articles, Behn has experienced a renaissance in the academic community during the last ten to fifteen years and has been installed in the seventeenth-century literary canon. Two related aspects of her career however have been overlooked. The first is her interest in natural philosophy, including her criticism of philosophers for not sharing their knowledge. The second aspect is her work as a translator, especially as a translator of scientific texts. Perhaps the enduring perception of translation as an essentially derivative activity has led scholars to dismiss Behn's translations as uninteresting or unoriginal. In so far as natural philosophy was a “masculine” discipline, however, Behn's translations demonstrated her ability to participate in and translate between elite natural philosophy, often written in Latin (the most “masculine” language), and a general or female audience.

‘Eyes without Light’

2018 ◽  
pp. 222-240
Author(s):  
Henry Power
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Political Messages ◽  
Oliver Cromwell ◽  
Charles Ii ◽  
The Many ◽  
The Relationship

During the seventeenth century the relationship between monarch and universities was a highly political one. This chapter considers the many collections of verse—in English and Latin—issued by the universities in response to royal successions. The protocols surrounding these volumes allowed for a certain amount of political self-expression. This chapter argues that these volumes became a means by which the universities could establish a relationship with the new monarch. The first half of the chapter charts the emergence and operation of protocols for producing these commemorative volumes. The second half offers a case study of Cambridge’s two commemorative volumes, respectively on the death of Oliver Cromwell in 1658 and the accession of Charles II in 1660. The scholarly exercises contained within these volumes were capable of communicating significant political messages.

Thomas Spence and James Harrington: A Case Study in Influence

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen M. Lee
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Political Power ◽  
The Political ◽  
Systematic Account ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Decisive Influence ◽  
Political Works ◽  
The Relationship

This chapter examines the evidence for the standard claim that the seventeenth-century writer James Harrington and his utopian text Oceana were the decisive influence on Thomas Spence's ideas about land. In his introduction to The Political Works of Thomas Spence, H. T. Dickinson noted that Spence ‘was much influenced not only by the Bible, but by the idealised societies of Thomas More's Utopia and James Harrington's Oceana’, and ‘accepted James Harrington's thesis that political power was derived from the possession of property, especially landed property’. Other scholars such as Malcolm Chase and Thomas R. Knox have also identified the influence of Harrington, although they have been divided over its extent. This chapter offers a more systematic account of the relationship between Harrington and Spence in order to understand the nature and extent of any possible influence of Harrington on the latter.

The Christian Quaker: George Keith and the Keithian Controversy

2019 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-101
Author(s):  
Madeleine Ward
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Society Of Friends ◽  
Significant Case ◽  
Personality And Politics ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Religious Society Of Friends

Abstract How did the early Quakers understand the relationship between Quakerism and Christianity? Did they think faith in Jesus was necessary? What did they mean by the ‘Light within’? These were the central issues in the Keithian controversy: an explosive schism which broke out among Philadelphian Quakers in the 1690s when George Keith – arguably the most influential Quaker theologian of the seventeenth century – was accused of focusing too heavily on the Incarnate Jesus in his preaching. Keith left the movement under a cloud, and the Keithian controversy has often been explained away in terms of personality and politics. However, this volume presents a theological reading of the dispute. Through a study of Keith’s personal theological development, Madeleine Ward presents his departure from the movement as a significant case – study in the contested relationship between Quakerism and Christianity – and, ultimately, as a battle for the spiritual heart of the Religious Society of Friends.

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