Representing revolution in Milton and his contemporaries : religion, politics, and polemics in radical Puritanism

"Representing Revolution in Milton and his Contemporaries is a wide-ranging exploration of the interactions of literature, polemics, and religious politics in the English Revolution. Loewenstein highlights the powerful spiritual beliefs and religious ideologies in the polemical struggles of Milton, Marvell, and their radical Puritan contemporaries during these revolutionary decades. By examining a wide range of canonical and non-canonical writers - John Lilburne, Winstanley the Digger, and Milton, amongst others - he reveals how radical Puritans struggled with the contradictions and ambiguities of the English Revolution and its political regimes. Loewenstein's portrait of a faction-riven, violent seventeenth-century revolutionary culture is an original and significant contribution to our understanding of these turbulent decades and their aftermath. By placing Milton's great poems in the context of the period's radical religious politics, this book should be of interest to historians as well as literary scholars."--Jacket.