Title: Literature and the politics of family in seventeenth-century England /
Authors: Ng, Su Fang.
Publisher: Cambridge University Press,
Year: 2007
Subjects: English literature History and criticism; Families in literature.; Politics in literature.; Politics and literature Great Britain History; Families Political aspects Great Britain History; Families in literature.
Abstract: "While critical attention has focused on how the common analogy linking father and king, family and state, bolstered royal and paternal claims to authority and obedience, its meaning was in fact intensely contested. In this study, Su Fang Ng analyzes the language and metaphors used to describe the relationship between politics and the family in both literary and political writings and offers a new perspective on how seventeenth-century literature reflected as well as influenced political thought."--Jacket.
Contents: Introduction: strange bedfellows: patriarchalism and revolutionary thought; Part I. Revolutionary Debates: 1. Father-Kings and Amazon Queens; 2. Milton's band of brothers; 3. Hobbes and the absent family; 4. Cromwellian fatherhood and its discontents; Part II. Restoration Imaginings: Interchapter: Revolutionary legacies; 5. Execrable sons and second Adams: family politics in Paradise Lost; 6. Marriage and monarchy: Margaret Cavendish's Blazing World and the fictions of Queenly rule; 7. Marriage and discipline in early Quakerism; Epilogue: the family-state analogy's eighteenth-century afterlife.