“On First Looking into Revisionism”: The Literature of Civil War, Revolution, and Restoration

Historical Revisionism of the 1970s and 1980s transformed the landscape of seventeenth-century English politics. What once seemed a world secure in broad national polarities became a mosaic of contingencies, uncertain affinities, and local allegiances. Enter literary history: a discipline especially receptive to contingency and complexity. And yet, literary historians have been unusually slow to abandon clear-cut categories: of Cavalier lyrics, of Royalist romance, of Puritan sobriety and spirituality. But the more we probe such categories, the more porous and unsteady they become. To what culture might a book like The Poems of Mr. John Milton (1645) belong, with its masque and nativity ode, its Latin elegies on princes of the Church, together with its prophetic denunciation of clerical corruption? Steven N. Zwicker’s aim in this essay is to question familiar literary categories and to ask how our understanding of seventeenth-century literature might become, under a sort of literary revisionism, a more nuanced and liminal affair.