Writing Under Tyranny: English Literature and the Henrician Reformation

by Greg Walker

Overview

Writing Under Tyranny: English Literature and the Henrician Reformation spans the boundaries between literary studies and history. It looks at the impact of tyrannical government on the work of poets, playwrights, and prose writers of the early English Renaissance. It shows the profound effects that political oppression had on the literary production of the years from 1528 to 1547, and how English writers in turn strove to mitigate, redirect, and finally resist that oppression. The result was the destruction of a number of forms that had dominated the literary production of late-medieval England, but also the creation of new forms that were to dominate the writing of the following centuries. Paradoxically, the tyranny of Henry VIII gave birth to many modes of writing now seen to be characteristic of the English literary Renaissance.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780191536199
Publisher:	OUP Oxford
Publication date:	10/20/2005
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
File size:	938 KB

About the Author

Professor of Early-Modern Literature and Culture, University of Leicester

Table of Contents

List of Abbreviations     xi
Introduction     1
The Long Divorce of Steel     5
Poetry and the Culture of Counsel: The 1532 Workes of Geffray Chaucer Newly Printed and John Heywood's Play of the Weather
A Gift for King Henry VIII     29
The Signs of the World     36
Reading Chaucer in 1532     56
Thynne and Tuke's Apocrypha     73
Mocking the Thunder     100
'To Virtue Persuaded'?: The Persistent Counsels of Sir Thomas Elyot
Sir Thomas Elyot and the King's Great Matter     123
The Book Named the Governor     141
Tyranny and the Conscience of Man     181
From Supremacy to Tyranny, 1533-40     225
The Apotheosis of Sir Thomas Elyot     240
The Death of Counsel: Sir Thomas Wyatt and Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey
Sir Thomas Wyatt: Poetry and Politics     279
Tyranny Condemned     296
Wyatt's Embassy, Treason, and 'The Defence"     335
Pleading with Power     351
'Wyatt Resteth Here'     377
Writing Under Tyranny     414
Notes     433
Index     539

Editorial Reviews

"Walker's strength is that he understands and engages intimately with the culture of a generation schooled in the rhetorical tradition.... Walker is a most acute critic of the literature of an age when most published writers were active politicians and most politicians were writers."—Patrick Collinson, London Review of Books

"Walker's readings invest the literature of the early sixteenth century with a complex political urgency that is more often associated with Elizabethan texts. This thoroughly researched and well-written book asks us to rethink the standard narrative of sixteenth-century literary history ... For scholars in the fields of literature and history, Writing under Tyranny is destined to become a classic."—Journal of British Studies

"A new book by Greg Walker...is a major event."—Reviews in History

"Walker gives voice to a fascinating dialogue between literature and politics in a compelling work.... This is an actively engaging book, required reading for anyone interested in the relation between literature and politics, and a welcome addition to the ranks of intellectual history."—Alessandra Petrina, Renaissance Quarterly

"A monumental achievement that furthers our understanding of an area that Walker has done much to illuminate over the years. The careful and scrupulous analysis of a whole range of texts that deserve to be better known, and more meticulously read, has resulted in a serious, scholarly and, in places, profound work, well written throughout."—Andrew Hadfield, Times Literary Supplement

From the Publisher