Literature and politics of family

Su Fang Ng0521870313, 9780521870313

A common literary language linked royal absolutism to radical religion and republicanism in seventeenth-century England. Authors from both sides of the Civil Wars, including Milton, Hobbes, Margaret Cavendish, and the Quakers, adapted the analogy between family and state to support radically different visions of political community. They used family metaphors to debate the limits of political authority, rethink gender roles, and imagine community in a period of social and political upheaval. 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 wide-ranging study, Su Fang Ng analyses the language and metaphors used to describe the relationship between politics and the family in both literary and political writings and offers a fresh perspective on how seventeenth-century literature reflected as well as influenced political thought.

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Table of contents :
Cover……Page 1
Half-title……Page 3
Title……Page 5
Copyright……Page 6
Contents……Page 7
Acknowledgments……Page 8
Introduction: strange bedfellows – patriarchalism and revolutionary thought……Page 11
PART I Revolutionary debates……Page 29
Father-kings……Page 31
James and the contradictions of family roles……Page 38
Amazon queens……Page 44
Interpreting subjects……Page 55
Christian fraternity……Page 59
Republican liberty……Page 68
Fathers and citizens……Page 79
CHAPTER 3 Hobbes and the absent family……Page 86
Hobbes and patriarchalism……Page 89
From family analogy to body politic……Page 95
The civil state of christian community……Page 105
Conclusion……Page 109
CHAPTER 4 Cromwellian fatherhood and its discontents……Page 113
Reforming cromwell: Winstanley, Sexby, and Harrington……Page 116
“A Cromwell in an houre a prince will grow”: Richard the protector……Page 128
Ghostly Cromwells: anti-cromwellian satire……Page 134
PART II Restoration imaginings……Page 141
Interchapter: revolutionary legacies……Page 143
Genesis, paradise lost, and patriarchal theories of the state……Page 153
The divine family circle……Page 155
Family hierarchy in the state of nature……Page 165
New monarchy, old cavaliers……Page 179
Heroic queens: Figurations of Henrietta Maria……Page 187
The monarch’s two bodies……Page 196
Nostalgia and the context of restoration immorality……Page 202
Rival state……Page 205
Family and marriage……Page 211
Gender and schism……Page 221
Epilogue: the family-state analogy’s
eighteenth-century afterlife……Page 232
Index……Page 240