Milton's Spectre in the Restoration: Marvell, Dryden, and Literary Enthusiasm

Achinstein, Sharon

doi:10.2307/3817903

Cited by 11 publications

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“…16 Guibbory, 1-10. 17 Keeble, 2002, builds on Keeble, 1987, as well as on studies of republican literary culture from the 1640s to the 1660s by Smith; Achinstein, 1994;Norbrook;Loewenstein, 2001. Keeble, 2002, 132-34, describes Milton's Paradise Lost and Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress as responses to the Restoration settlement, identifies continuities between 1650s Puritan and republican polemics and 1660s dissenting texts, and claims that Restoration dissenters countered royalist providential history with biblical narratives of suffering and redemption.…”

Section: P O L I T I C a L C A T A S T R O P H E : ''My H A R P U N Smentioning

confidence: 99%

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Royalist Reclamation of Psalmic Song in 1650s England

Loscocco

2011

Renaiss. Q.

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This article brings into focus the royalist experience of political defeat and cultural recovery in mid-seventeenth-century England. It shows how royalist writers developed a polemically charged psalmic poetics that allowed them to appropriate the discursive authority of their Puritan enemies, reestablish their own cultural standing, and prepare the way for religious and political return. Several writers who found common cause in 1650s royalist poetics appear in these pages, including Izaak Walton, Thomas Stanley, Jeremy Taylor, Henry King, and the author(s) of the 1649 Eikon Basilike. Royalist writers with more divided responses to psalmic polemics appear here as well, including the episcopal divine, Henry Hammond, and the Davidic poet, Abraham Cowley. The poet, psalmist, and polemicist John Milton is an important presence throughout: his Eikonoklastes seems aware of his opponents’ polemical project, as do his 1653 psalms, and Paradise Lost itself may respond to what he once derided as royalist “Psalmistry.”

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Section: P O L I T I C a L C A T A S T R O P H E : ''My H A R P U N Smentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Creaser, 44, builds on Norbrook when he equates blank verse with political freedom, and rhyme with political conservativism. Achinstein, 1990, 6, 11, discusses Milton's blank verse, and notes that for him “literary style was thus an allegorical equivalent of a political opinion.”…”

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Royalist Reclamation of Psalmic Song in 1650s England

Loscocco

2011

Renaiss. Q.

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“…Is Derrida's, then, a retreat from the republican "specter of Milton"? 12 Difficult to say, of course. But it is instructive to consider differences between the Shakespearean legacy that Derrida prizes and the republican international legacy that in recent accounts has seemingly fallen from view.…”

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Big Leagues: Specters of Milton and Republican International Justice between Shakespeare and Marx

Warren¹

2016

Humanity

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Surprisingly enough, discussions of Hamlet have recently become deeply intertwined with debates about international law and international justice. A precipitating cause is Jacques Derrida's late work Specters of Marx, in which Shakespeare's Hamlet played a crucial organizing role. Because of Specters of Marx, whose subtitle is The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International, Hamlet is now, in Nicholas Royle's words, "an exemplary text for thinking together about the current state of the world." 1 What has also emerged as scholars have returned to Karl Marx and Shakespeare through Derrida might be called a literary history of the International. But if we define the "literary history of the International" loosely as the nexus of texts, conditions, ideas, and contexts that informed Marx and Friedrich Engels' internationalism, the story now skips easily-too easily-from Shakespeare, to Marx, to Derrida along the path of "hauntology" proposed there by Derrida himself-Derrida's playful substitute for "ontology," which he proposes in part in order to theorize literary history's claims on the present. 2 Among the aspects of the literary history of the International that Specters of Marx has made it surprisingly easy to pass over is precisely what Engels first, then Marx, in late 1847, admonished their international readership not to neglect: "Let us never forget Milton, the first defender of regicide." 3 Ghosts are choosy about whom they visit. From the perspective of Derridean "hauntology," little between Shakespeare and Marx holds much significance except that the Ghost of Shakespeare's Hamlet traversed time to visit Marx. To insist that Milton's republicanism, as seen in Paradise Lost among other places, also belongs alongside Hamlet in a literary history of the International is, however, a key aim of this essay. A critic of republicanism, Derrida himself diffused objections that he wrote from "conservative or reactionary motivations or even [from] moderate right-wing or republican positions"; but that should not obscure nineteenth-century radicals' own interest in republicanism-registered, for example, by the late 1847 call for internationally minded Europeans to honor the regicide Milton, or even the fact that George Julian Harney's newspaper in which The Communist Manifesto first appeared in English, in 1850, was called The Red Republican. 4 The nineteenth century brought distinctly new forms of international organizing. On the right, the early nineteenth century saw European monarchs' intimately coordinated defense of monarchism following the destabilizing American, French, and (less often mentioned) Haitian revolutions. 5 On the heels of this "royal international," industrial-age, Manchester School thinkers like Richard Cobden developed a liberal

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The Life of John Milton

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Milton's Spectre in the Restoration: Marvell, Dryden, and Literary Enthusiasm

Cited by 11 publications

References 26 publications

Royalist Reclamation of Psalmic Song in 1650s England

Royalist Reclamation of Psalmic Song in 1650s England

Big Leagues: Specters of Milton and Republican International Justice between Shakespeare and Marx

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