Lines of Authority: Politics and English Literary Culture, 1649–1689

Focusing on the turbulent years between the execution of Charles I and the triumph of William III, Steven N. Zwicker reads English literature as a series of brilliant and deeply engaged polemical contests. Zwicker juxtaposes overtly polemical writings—pamphlets, broadsides, and ballads—with canonical works, including epic, historical verse, tragedy, and satire, in order to demonstrate how literature not only reflected on political action but also formed an important site of political exchange. Zwicker maintains that the sources of Restoration culture lay within the civil war years of the 1640s and that the memory of those years shaped writing and politics for the remainder of the century. In sensitive readings of such classic texts as Walton's Compleat Angler, Marvell's First Anniversary and Last Instructions, Milton's Paradise Lost, Dryden's Annus Mirabilis and Absalom and Achitophel, and Locke's Two Treatises of Government, he shows how these texts both engaged with pamphlet, squib, and broadside and challenged one another over the possession of cultural authority. Zwicker's analysis provides a new understanding of the connections between politics and aesthetics in the later seventeenth century and an appreciation for the texture of this culture. Successfully integrating literary history and political analysis, Lines of Authority will be valuable reading for a broad audience in the fields of Restoration and Protectorate literature, literary history, cultural and intellectual history, and the history of political thought.

About the Author :
Steven N. Zwicker is Professor of English and Co-director of the Program in Literature and History at Washington University, St. Louis.

Review :
Lines of Authority is an important contribution to the study of seventeenth-century English literature and politics and provides an extremely fruitful model for further studies of Restoration texts. - Scott Campbell Lucas, Duke University (Renaissance Quarterly) Zwicker addresses... English literary culture from the [1640s to] 1688, and he includes in his regard works by Davenant, Hobbes, Cowley, Sprat, Milton, Marvell, Walton, and Locke.... The book makes its strongest claim by the subtlety and specificity of its particular readings, by its sometimes unexpected juxtapositions of texts and events, and by the exemplary appeal of its critical methodology. (Journal of English and German Philology) [Lines of Authority] is... elegantly written,... and I imagine that part of the book's stylistic power derives precisely from the author's sensitivity to the nuances of a world that he does not assume to be our own. (STUDIES IN ENGLISH LITERATURE 1500-1900)