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Censored and incomplete, Milton's History of Britain stands as a broken monument to the controversies of the 17th century, as well as to the political and religious ambitions of Milton himself. This book is a comparative study of the History's composition and publication which allows new perspectives on Milton's republican allegiances from the 1640s to the 1670s, and beyond. Now the History can be seen as Milton's response to the crisis of the English Revolution in 1648–9. This examination of the History also permits a wider view of the publication and reception of Milton's work in the Restoration; in particular, the work's censorship makes it a central text in the study of Restoration publishing. This first full-length study makes Milton's History available to scholars as never before. Because early modern histories can only be understood with reference to the texts they recycle, the History has hitherto proved largely impenetrable. This study provides the contextual information with which we can make sense of the composition and publication of the History.

This book surveys the early history of one of our most important modern myths: the story of Frankenstein and the monster he created from dismembered corpses, as it appeared in fictional and other writings before its translation to the cinema screen. It examines the range of meanings that Mary Shelley's Frankenstein offers in the light of the political images of ‘monstrosity’ generated by the French Revolution. Later chapters trace the myth's analogues and protean transformations in subsequent writings, from the tales of Hoffmann and Hawthorne to the novels of Dickens, Melville, Conrad, and Lawrence, taking in the historical and political writings of Carlyle and Marx as well as the science fiction of Stevenson and Wells. The book shows that while the myth did come to be applied metaphorically to technological development, its most powerful associations have centred on relationships between people, in the family, in work, and in politics.

The French Revolution of 1789 bequeathed an enduring rhetoric of human rights which made it conventional to declare oneself against censorship and in favour of freedom of expression. But, as this book demonstrates, the apparent consensus on this issue in modern France and elsewhere rests on a shaky sense of that rhetoric's history. And, while censors have continued to the present day to charge clumsily across delicate moral and political fields, opponents of literary censorship, in particular, have frequently displayed excessive respect for censored material, mistakenly assuming that the censor can be relied upon to identify material that is disturbing, subversive, or true. This book focuses on key episodes in the history of literary censorship in France. It examines the Madame Bovary trial of 1857, and the prosecution a century later of Pauvert, publisher of Sade's complete works. It analyses and criticizes the Freudian-influenced attempts by the Surrealist movement and by Barthes and the Tel Quel group to subvert and evade censorship. Drawing on a wide range of disciplines and approaches including history, literary theory and feminism, the book presents a critique of the ideas on censorship which resurfaced repeatedly in the discourse of human rights, psychoanalysis and literary culture.

This book considers William Blake's prophetic books written during the 1790s in the light of the French Revolution controversy raging at the time. His works are shown to be less the expressions of isolated genius than the products of a complex response to the cultural politics of his contemporaries. Blake's work presents a stern challenge to historical criticism. This study aims to meet the challenge by investigating contexts outside the domains of standard literary histories. It traces the distinctive rhetoric of the illuminated books to the French Revolution controversy of the 1790s and Blake's fusion of the diverse currents of radicalism abroad in that decade. The study is supported by original research. Blake emerges from these pages as a ‘bricoleur’ who fused the language of London's popular dissenting culture with the more sceptical radicalism of the Enlightenment. This book presents a more comprehensively politicized picture of Blake than any previous study.

This book explores the role of canon law in the ecclesiastical reform movement of the eleventh century, commonly known as the Gregorian Refom movement. Focusing on the Collectio canonum of Bishop Anselm of Lucca — hitherto largely unexplored in English — it is concerned with the symbiotic relationship between canon law and reform, and seeks to explore the ways in which Anselm’s writing can be seen in the context of the reformer’s need to devise and articulate strategies for the renovation of the Church and Christian society. Its principal contention is that Anselm’s collection cannot be seen merely as a catalogue of canon law, but also functioned to articulate, define, and propagate reformist doctrine in a time of great social and religious upheaval.

This book traces the shift from medieval to modern institutions in English agriculture. It explores their importance for productivity growth, income distribution, and the contribution of agriculture to British economic development. The author study shows that, contrary to the assumption of many historians, small-scale farmers in the open-field system were responsible for a considerable proportion of the productivity growth achieved between the middle ages and the nineteenth century. The process of enclosure and the replacement of these yeomen by large-scale tenant farming relying on wage labour had relatively little impact on the agricultural contribution to economic development during the Industrial Revolution. Enclosures and large farms enriched landowners without benefiting consumers, workers, or farmers.

Charles James Fox was one of the most colourful figures in 18th-century politics. Notorious for the excesses of his private life, he was at the same time one of the leading politicians of his generation, dominating the Whig party and polite society. As the political rival of Pitt the Younger and the intellectual rival of Edmund Burke, his views on the major issues of the day — the American War of Independence, the French Revolution, parliamentary reform — formed the character of Whiggery in his own time and for years to come. Fox's historical reputation has been hotly disputed. Some have hailed him as one of the founding fathers of Radicalism, others have dismissed him as an irritating and irresponsible impediment to the statesmanship of Pitt. This book shows that in many ways Fox was a politician through circumstance, not inclination. The book analyses the ties of kinship and friendship which to an astonishing degree dictated Fox's politics, and offers striking new assessments of Whiggery and its most potent personality.

Ernie O'Malley (1897–1957) was one of the most talented and colourful of modern Irish republicans. An important IRA leader in the 1916–1923 Irish Revolution, this bookish gunman subsequently became a distinguished intellectual, and the author of two classic autobiographical accounts of the revolutionary period: On Another Man's Wound and The Singing Flame. His post-revolutionary life took on a bohemian flavour. Travelling extensively in Europe and America, he mixed with a wide range of artistic and literary figures, and devoted himself to a variety of writing projects. In his IRA career he mixed with revolutionaries such as Michael Collins and Eamon de Valera; in his post-IRA years his friends included Samuel Beckett, Louis MacNeice, John Wayne, and John Ford. This thematic biography draws on previously unseen archival sources, and introduces O'Malley to both scholarly and general readers. O'Malley's post-revolutionary life was as turbulent as his IRA years, and illuminates many persistent themes of Irish history, ranging from the origins and culture of militant republicanism and the complexities of Anglo–Irish relations to the development of intellectual and artistic life in twentieth-century Ireland.