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Poetry and Sovereignty in the English Revolution presents a new interpretation of the poetry of the English revolution. It focuses on royalist poets who left their cause behind following the abolition of the monarchy, exploring how they re-imagined the traditional language of allegiance in newly secular, artificial, and absolutist ways. Following the execution of Charles I in 1649 royalists who had sided with the King were left with a significant vacuum to fill. Poetry and Sovereignty in the English Revolution charts the poetry of Andrew Marvell, Edmund Waller, John Dryden, William Davenant, Abraham Cowley, and Margaret Cavendish amongst others in this period. It examines the poets' close acquaintance with Thomas Hobbes, offering new readings of the reception and adaptation of Hobbes's ideas in contemporary poetry. A final chapter traces how the poets survived the restoration of the Stuart monarchy, showing how they continued to apply their ideas in the heroic drama of the 1660s. Poetry and Sovereigniy in the English Revolution builds on recent work in both literary criticism and the history of political thought to contextualize royalist poets within a distinctive strain of absolutism inflected by reason of state, neostoicism, scepticism, and anticlericalism. It demonstrates a vivid poetic effort to imagine the expanded state delivered by the English Revolution.

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9780191893032

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Niall Allsopp, Lecturer in English, University of Exeter Niall Allsopp is a Lecturer in English at the University of Exeter. He specializes in the literature of the seventeenth century, and particularly the English Revolution, with interests including how literature negotiates the ideas of sovereignity, political obligations, public rituals, and social cohesion in a period when such concepts were radically tested. His essay Threshold Rituals in Early Modern England: A Case Study in Robert Herrick won the Review of English Studies essay prize 2016.

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