Radicalism in British Literary Culture, 1650-1830: From Revolution to Revolution

Description

In this volume of interdisciplinary essays, leading scholars examine the radical tradition in British literary culture from the English Revolution to the French Revolution. They chart continuities between the two periods and examine the recuperation of ideas and texts from the earlier period in the 1790s and beyond. Contributors utilize a variety of approaches and concepts: from gender studies, the cultural history of food and diet and the history of political discourse, to explorations of the theatre, philosophy and metaphysics. This volume argues that the radical agendas of the mid-seventeenth century, intended to change society fundamentally, did not disappear throughout the long eighteenth-century only to be resuscitated at its close. Rather, through close textual analysis, these essays indicate a more continuous transmission.

Timothy Morton is Associate Professor of English at the University of Colorado in Boulder. He is the Author of Shelley and the Revolution in Taste (Cambridge, 1995), and The Poetics of Spice (Cambridge, 2000). Nigel Smith is Professor of English at Princeton University. He is the author of Perfection Proclaimed (1989) and Literature and the English Revolution (1994).

"This collection of essays is uniformly lucid, engaging, and densely documented ... it offers a rich tapestry representing strains of radical thought." Seventeenth-Century News