Reimagining Constancy in the English Civil Wars - by Rachel Zhang

About the Book

Exposes writers' reliance on conservative language during one of the most radical periods of English history

Book Synopsis

Reimagining Constancy in the English Civil Wars exposes writers' reliance on conservative language during one of the most radical periods of English history. In case studies of both familiar genres (country house poem, love lyric, epic) and understudied ones (emblem book, prose romance), it shows how the conservative language of "constancy" was used to justify opposing positions in the period's most pressing controversies, including monarchical rule, ecclesiastical order, Catholicism, and England's relationship to the wider world. At the same time, writers like John Milton, Andrew Marvell, Hester Pulter, Percy Herbert, and others establish the virtue's importance to literary tradition, as they use "constancy" to retain, yet reimagine inherited formal structures and strategies. This book thus uses women's writing and non-canonical texts to highlight cross-factional conservatism and international investment in what scholars often describe as the "English Revolution".

Review Quotes

This is a work of most impressive painstaking and discerning intelligence and discovery, with many pages of exquisitely balanced interpretation. Rachel Dunn Zhang uncovers the 'ties that bind' in the literature of the English Civil War, the Wars of the Three Kingdoms, in the delicate articulation of constancy and the treatment of formal obligations, such as oaths, whatever the allegiance of the writer. The reader encounters new readings of famous poetry, such as that of Lanyer, Herrick, Milton, Marvell and The Book of Common Prayer, but also a host of valuable lesser-known works, some unknown until very recently, such as the emblems of Hester Pulter or Sir Percy Herbert's romance The Princess Cloria, these now much more approachable in the digital age. Every chapter is a must-read for students as well as specialists in the future, and all readers will be galvanized by the turn to contemporary concerns with freedom, beauty, ugliness and hope that comes in the epilogue.--Nigel Smith, Princeton University