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COPYRIGHT 2000 Indiana University, Purdue University of Fort Wayne
Writing the English Republic: Poetry, Rhetoric and Politics, 1627-1660. By David Norbrook. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. xiii + 509 pages.
Already David Norbrook's imposing study--the anticipated successor to his Poetry and Politics in the English Renaissance (1984)--has been recognized as a requisite point of reference in seventeenth-century literary studies. An entire panel, for instance, was devoted to its discussion this summer at the British Milton Symposium in York. If any work still remains for effective advertisement, it may lie in the fields of history and political science, where Norbrook's book has a degree of relevance uncommon to literary projects. Writing the English Republic seeks to reconfigure prominent accounts of seventeenth-century history and political identity no less than it seeks to inform our reading of republican poetry. Its success with historical reconfiguration depends largely on the preconceptions with which one picks up the book; and some readers may find Norbrook's characterization of current "models" of the mid-seventeenth century too narrow. But his vigorous analysis of republican poetry politicizes our reading of this literature with a force that certainly encourages historical revision.
In a narrative that flirts circumspectly with the Whiggish, Norbrook counters the "acts of oblivion" through which seventeenth-century royalists and some modern scholars have erased a fitful but energetic republican culture that extended both before and after the civil wars in England. Although 1649 and 1660 remain important if more epistemically permeable years, we are encouraged to treat 1653--the year Cromwell's coup converted Commonwealth to Protectorate--as just as galvanizing when seen through republican eyes. That the significance of this date is often lost appears as evidence of a cover-up: "The blurring of any distinction between the Commonwealth and the Protectorate in the national memory is perhaps the most striking example of the elision of a republican perspective" (3). Nodding to but not embracing a new historicism, Norbrook explores "parallels between artistic and political representation" that seem to stop short of the conventional chiasmus between social and textual events: "republican politics produced a republican poetics" (10). The "anti-humanist" program of much new historicist...
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