Review
"Wonderful...contributes greatly to our understanding of a highly complex and constantly controversial historical figure." Christianity and Literature
"The book is a valuable contribution to the literature and its thirty-eight illustrations much enhance it's appeal." Albion
"Knoppers has provided a model for future cultural analyses in her insistence on the importance of cultural contexts, her emphasis on the way popular culture, as well as high culture, shapes public perception, and her demonstration of the real power of mass media in selecting and empowering images." Elizabeth Skerpan-Wheeler, Journal of English and Germanic Philology
Book Description
Constructing Cromwell traces the complex and shifting popular print images of Oliver Cromwell from his first appearance as a public figure in the 1640s through the period of his power to his death and eventual disinterment after the restoration of the monarchy. Drawing on extensive archival research, including manuscript sources, startling print ephemera, and visual artifacts, Laura Knoppers shows how Cromwellian print transformed the courtly forms of Caroline ceremony, portraiture and panegyric. Her study also finds a new cultural context for authors such as Milton, Marvell, Dryden and Waller.
Constructing Cromwell: Ceremony, Portrait and Print, 1645-1661 FROM THE PUBLISHER
Constructing Cromwell traces the complex and shifting popular images of Oliver Cromwell from his first appearance as a public figure in the mid-1640s through the period of his power to his death and eventual disinterment after the restoration of the monarchy. The meaning and impact of this enigmatic figure have long been debated in the context of mid-seventeenth-century crisis, but contemporary representations of Cromwell have largely been neglected. Cromwellian print, Laura Knoppers argues, transformed the courtly forms of Caroline ceremony, portraiture, and panegyric and in turn complicated and altered the cultural forms available to Charles II. The book draws on extensive archival research, including manuscript sources, startling print ephemera, and visual artifacts. Placing canonical authors such as Milton, Marvell, Waller, and Dryden alongside such neglected writers as George Wither and Payne Fisher, Knoppers demonstrates how literary texts both respond and contribute to political and cultural change.
Art & Photography
Book Info
