What is meant by the Puritan literary tradition, and when did the idea of Puritan literature, as distinct from Puritan beliefs and practices, come into being? The answer is not straightforward. This volume addresses these questions by bringing together new research on a wide range of established and emerging literary subjects that help to articulate the Puritan literary tradition, including: political polemic and the performing arts; conversion and New-World narratives; individual and corporate life-writings; histories of exile and womens history; book history and the translation and circulation of Puritan literature abroad; Puritan epistolary networks; discourses of Puritan friendship; the historiography of Puritanism defined through editing and publishing; doctrinal controversy; and the history of emotions. This essay collection proposes that a Puritan literary tradition existed that was distinct from broader conceptions of early modern English and Protestant traditions and offers a nuanced account of the distinct and variegated contribution that Puritanism has made to the construction of literature as a concept in English. It ranges from the late sixteenth through to the nineteenth century, and spans British, European, and American Puritan cultures. It offers new analyses of well-known Puritan writers such as Anne Bradstreet, John Bunyan, Richard Baxter, and John Milton, as well as less familiar figures, such as Mary Rowlandson and Joseph Hussey, and writers less often associated with Puritanism, such as Andrew Marvell and Aphra Behn.

This is a major reinterpretation of John Bunyan, each of whose works, including the posthumous, is analyzed in its immediate historical context. The author draws on recent literature on depression to demonstrate that Bunyan suffered from this mood disorder as a young man and then used this experience to help mold his literary works.

The Oxford Handbook of Daniel Defoe is the most comprehensive overview available of the author's life, times, writings, and reception. Daniel Defoe (1660-1731) is a major author in world literature, renowned for a succession of novels including Robinson Crusoe, Moll Flanders, and A Journal of the Plague Year, but more famous in his lifetime as a poet, journalist, and political agent. Across his vast oeuvre, which includes books, pamphlets, and periodicals, Defoe commented on virtually every development and issue of his lifetime, a turbulent and transformative period in British and global history. Defoe has proven challenging to position--in some respects he is a traditional and conservative thinker, but in other ways he is a progressive and innovative writer. He therefore benefits from the range of critical appraisals offered in this Handbook. The Handbook ranges from concerns of gender, class, and race to those of politics, religion, and economics. In accessible but learned chapters, contributors explore salient contexts in ways that show how they overlap and intersect, such as in chapters on science, environment, and empire. The Handbook provides both a thorough introduction to Defoe and to early eighteenth-century society, culture, and literature more broadly. Thirty-six chapters by leading literary scholars and historians explore the various genres in which Defoe wrote; the sociocultural contexts that inform his works; his writings on different locales, from the local to the global; and the posthumous reception and creative responses to his works.

Reprint of the original, first published in 1872. The publishing house Anatiposi publishes historical books as reprints. Due to their age, these books may have missing pages or inferior quality. Our aim is to preserve these books and make them available to the public so that they do not get lost.