Refiguring Revolutions: Aesthetics and Politics from the English Revolution to the Romantic Revolution

Front Cover
Kevin Sharpe, Steven N. Zwicker
University of California Press, 1998 M01 1 - 376 pages
Refiguring Revolutions presents an original and interdisciplinary reassessment of the cultural and political history of England from 1649 to 1789. Bypassing conventional chronologies and traditional notions of disciplinary divides, editors Kevin Sharpe and Steven Zwicker frame a set of new agendas for, and suggest new approaches to, the study of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century England.
Customary periodization by dynasty and century obscures the aesthetic and cultural histories that were enacted between and even by the English Civil Wars and the French Revolution. The authors of the essays in this volume set about returning aesthetics to the center of the master narrative of politics. They focus on topics and moments that illuminate the connection between aesthetic issues of a private or public nature and political culture. Politics between the Puritan Revolution and the Romantic Revolution, these authors argue, was a set of social and aesthetic practices, a narrative of presentations, exchanges, and performances as much as it was a story of monarchies and ministries. Refiguring Revolutions presents an original and interdisciplinary reassessment of the cultural and political history of England from 1649 to 1789. Bypassing conventional chronologies and traditional notions of disciplinary divides, editors Kevin Sharpe and Steven Zwicker frame a set of new agendas for, and suggest new approaches to, the study of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century England.
Customary periodization by dynasty and century obscures the aesthetic and cultural histories that were enacted between and even by the English Civil Wars and the French Revolution. The authors of the essays in this volume set about returning aesthetics to the center of the master narrative of politics. They focus on topics and moments that illuminate the connection between aesthetic issues of a private or public nature and political culture. Politics between the Puritan Revolution and the Romantic Revolution, these authors argue, was a set of social and aesthetic practices, a narrative of presentations, exchanges, and performances as much as it was a story of monarchies and ministries.
 

Contents

The Failure of Republican Culture
25
Oliver Cromwell 1651
31
Frontispiece to Eikon Basilike 1649
34
Pious Instructions
38
Charles I defends the tree of religion
40
The Dragon of the Commonwealths Standing Army
41
Toni Bowers
57
Anne of Denmark 1688 1
63
Politics and the Habits of Appropriation
101
The Politics of Song in Wordsworths Lyrical Ballads
116
Bernard Mandeville
141
Gender Difference and Commercial Culture
173
Sir John Floyer and the Politics of Cold Bathing
197
Hogarth The Company of Undertakers
223
Rowlandson The ToothAche or Torment and Torture 1823
225
Hogarth The Reward of Cruelty
226

Anne of Denmark with the Duke of Gloucester
65
John Barrell
75
Gillray Louis XVI Taking Leave of His Wife and Family 1792
82
The Kings Departure from His Disconsolate Family
84
The Final Interview of Louis the Sixteenth
86
British medal by Küchler that depicts the final interview 1793
88
Rowlandson Medical Dispatch or Dr Doubledose Killing Two Birds with One Stone
227
Hogarth Cunicularii or The Wise Men of Godliman in Consultation 1726
229
A Natural Revolution? Garden Politics in EighteenthCentury England
241
NOTES 291
291
Copyright

Other editions - View all

Common terms and phrases

About the author (1998)

Kevin Sharpe is Professor of History at the University of Southampton, England. Author of The Personal Rule of Charles the First (1996), he coedited with Steven Zwicker the influential Politics of Discourse (California, 1987). Steven N. Zwicker, whose most recent book is Lines of Authority: Politics and English Literary Culture, 1649-1689 (1993), is Professor of English at Washington University, St. Louis.

Bibliographic information