Reimagining Constancy in the Literature of the English Civil Wars

[headline]Exposes writers' reliance on conservative language during one of the most radical periods of English history Using case studies of both familiar genres (country house poem, love lyric, epic) and understudied ones (emblem book, prose romance), Rachel Dunn Zhang demonstrates how the conservative language of 'constancy' underpinned the most pressing controversies of the English civil wars. Examining the work of John Milton, Andrew Marvell, Hester Pulter, Percy Herbert and others, Zhang exposes how writers invoked constancy to justify opposing positions in mid-seventeenth century debates over monarchical rule, ecclesiastical order, Catholicism and England's relationship to the wider world, even as they established the virtue's importance to literary tradition. Constancy was the means by which writers retained and reimagined inherited formal structures and strategies, complicating characterisations of the period as one of generic failure and fragmentation. In this important work, Zhang draws on underrepresented female and non-canonical voices to highlight cross-factional conservatism and international investment in what scholars often describe as the 'English Revolution'. [bio]Rachel Dunn Zhang is a scholar of early modern literature residing in the New York City area who has taught at Columbia University, Rutgers University, City College of New York and Touro College's Lander College for Women. Her work has been published in numerous scholarly journals, including Milton Studies, Ben Jonson Journal, Studies in Philology, Early Modern Women, The Seventeenth Century and Notes and Queries. An authority on Hester Pulter, Zhang is also a contributing editor for The Pulter Project.