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What is meant by the Puritan literary tradition, and when did the idea of Puritan literature, as distinct from Puritan beliefs and practices, come into being? The answer is not straightforward. This volume addresses these questions by bringing together new research on a wide range of established and emerging literary subjects that help to articulate the Puritan literary tradition, including: political polemic and the performing arts; conversion and New-World narratives; individual and corporate life-writings; histories of exile and womens history; book history and the translation and circulation of Puritan literature abroad; Puritan epistolary networks; discourses of Puritan friendship; the ...
** A FINANCIAL TIMES, NEW STATESMAN AND GUARDIAN BOOK OF THE YEAR ** 'A must read' - Janina Ramirez, bestselling author of Femina 'An eye-opening history of Britain's enduring fixation with its own past' - Jeremy Paxman 'Rule, Nostalgia announces Woods as one of the most interesting new historians of her generation' - Dan Snow Longing to go back to the 'good old days' is nothing new. For hundreds of years, the British have mourned the loss of tradition and called for a revival of 'simpler', 'better' ways of life, from modern politicians indulging in fantasies of an imperial past, to Victorian artists yearning to retreat into a medieval dream of Merry England. But were the 'good old days' ever quite how we remember them? Rule, Nostalgia is a surprising, timely new history of Britain that separates the history from the fantasy and traces back to its origins the powerful influence that nostalgia's perpetual backwards glance has had on British history, politics and society.
The Oxford History of Anglicanism is a major new and unprecedented international study of the identity and historical influence of one of the world's largest versions of Christianity. This global study of Anglicanism from the sixteenth century looks at how was Anglican identity constructed and contested at various periods since the sixteenth century; and what was its historical influence during the past six centuries. It explores not just the ecclesiastical and theological aspects of global Anglicanism, but also the political, social, economic, and cultural influences of this form of Christianity that has been historically significant in western culture, and a burgeoning force in non-western...
Recollection in the Republics provides the first comprehensive study of the ways Britain's Civil Wars were remembered in the decade between the regicide and the restoration.
Speaking at the Congress of African People in September 1970, Amiri Baraka said, “In Newark, when we greet each other on the streets, we say, ‘what time is it?’ We always say, ‘It’s nation time!’ Nationalism is about land and nation, a way of life trying to free itself.” National identity and nationhood are too often easily dismissed as retrograde populism or racist exclusion. Instead, they need to be understood as a key part of a vision of globalization that holds the imperatives of diversity and solidarity in a delicate balance. Jerry White offers a defence of the nation based on the assumption that struggles for national identity have often unfolded in ways that should be fa...
In Ireland, few figures have generated more hatred than Oliver Cromwell, whose seventeenth-century conquest, massacres, and dispossessions would endure in the social memory for ages to come. The Devil from over the Sea explores the many ways in which Cromwell was remembered and sometimes conveniently 'forgotten' in historical, religious, political, and literary texts, according to the interests of different communities across time. Cromwell's powerful afterlife in Ireland, however, cannot be understood without also investigating his presence in folklore and the landscape, in ruins and curses. Nor can he be separated from the idea of the 'Cromwellian': a term which came to elicit an entire ch...
In the decades before history was institutionalized as a scholarly discipline, historical writing was practiced variously by poets, record keepers, lawyers, sermonizers, mythologizers, and philosophers. In this welter of competing forms of historical thought, early modern drama often operated as a site in which claims about the nature of historical change could be treated in a frequently conflicting manner. To explore this arena of competing forms of historical explanation, Untimely Deaths in Renaissance Drama focuses on the problem of narrative abruption in a selection of historically minded early modern plays as they rely on various strategies to make sense of biography and fatality. Arguing that narrative forms fail in the face of untimely death, Andrew Griffin shows that the disruption appears as a matter of trauma, making the untimely death both a point of narrative conflict and a social problem. Exploring the formula that early modern dramatists used to make sense of life and death, this book draws on the wider context of this period's culture of historical writing.
Illuminates the relationship between Hume the political thinker, Hume the historian, and Hume the political economist and highlights the social, economic and institutional changes which he wove into an innovative theory of causation David Hume's six-volume History of England: From the Invasion of Julius Caesar to the Revolution in 1688 (1754-61) is probably his most important work as a constitutional historian and political theorist. Jia Wei's book shows that the History can be understood in two ways: firstly, as Hume's own narrative of England's state formation, and secondly, as his answer to the question of how eighteenth-century Britain could cope with the challengesof commercial revoluti...