The Poetics and Politics of Youth in Milton's England

This book argues that concepts of youth and childhood were central to seventeenth-century debates about political and poetic voice.

Blaine Greteman (Author)

9781107038080, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 19 August 2013

264 pages
23.5 x 15.8 x 1.8 cm, 0.51 kg

'Poetics and Politics of Youth in Milton's England … has insight to offer for Miltonists, scholars of theatrical culture, and political historians of Early Modern England alike.' Edmund Christie White, Notes and Queries

As the notion of government by consent took hold in early modern England, many authors used childhood and maturity to address contentious questions of political representation - about who has a voice and who can speak on his or her own behalf. For John Milton, Ben Jonson, William Prynne, Thomas Hobbes and others, the period between infancy and adulthood became a site of intense scrutiny, especially as they examined the role of a literary education in turning children into political actors. Drawing on new archival evidence, Blaine Greteman argues that coming of age in the seventeenth century was a uniquely political act. His study makes a compelling case for understanding childhood as a decisive factor in debates over consent, autonomy and political voice, and will offer graduate students and scholars a new perspective on the emergence of apolitical children's literature in the eighteenth century.

Acknowledgments
Abbreviations
Introduction: childish things
Part I. The Growth of Consent and Disciplining of Childhood in Early Modern England: 1. Coming of age on stage: Jonson's epicoene and the politics of childhood in early Stuart England
2. Children, literature, and the problem of consent
3. Contract's children: Thomas Hobbes and the culture of subjection
Part II. Milton and the Children of Liberty: 4. 'Perplex't paths': youth and authority in Milton's early work
5. 'Children of reviving libertie': the radical politics of Milton's pedagogy
6. 'Youthful beauty': infancy and adulthood among the angels of Paradise Lost
7. Children of paradise
Epilogue: 'children gathering pebbles on the shore'.

Subject Areas: Literary studies: fiction, novelists & prose writers [DSK], Literary studies: c 1500 to c 1800 [DSBD], Literary studies: classical, early & medieval [DSBB]