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

by Steven N. Zwicker

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.

Hardcover

First published January 1, 1993

Reviews

[Nelson · Rating 3 out of 5]

Central argument is that English literary culture of the period in question is absolutely saturated in political reference, innuendo, application, and so forth. The book makes good on this central claim with some sometimes surprising choices in test cases. Milton's Eikonklastes (in response to Eikon Basilike) is an obvious place to go; Isaak Walton's Compleat Angler is not. Another surprise is Locke's Two Treatises, which seemingly eschews overt contemporary political reference. Choosing to read that philosophical text primarily for its rhetorical gestures is a deft move. While the book ably defends its central thesis, there are times one longs to see Zwicker dig a little more deeply into the soil of the text, muddy his hands with close readings. If the point of the book is to show that the literary is everywhere political, it would be nice to have that point proven with even more narrowly focused grappling with the texts than appears here. The exception is the microscopically close reading of the first five lines of Dryden's Absalom and Achitophel, the book's test case least in need of such care. All of which is perhaps another way of saying the book's first chapter, laying out basic principles, is (to this reader anyway) more valuable than the individual literary readings on offer here.

[Julaine]

Ch3: Hunting and Angling: The Compleat Angler and the First Anniversary (Photocopy)
Ch2: The King's Head and Politics of Literary Property (Photocopy)