English Civil War / War of the Three Kingdoms

Abstract

The civil war between Charles I and his parliament broke out in England in 1642; rebellions were already underway in Scotland from 1637, and in Ireland from 1641. The conflict culminated with the trial and execution of the king in 1649. Through the 1650s Britain was governed as a republic, then as a Protectorate under Oliver Cromwell from 1653. But the regime unraveled after Cromwell’s death in 1658, ultimately leading to the Restoration of monarchy under Charles II in 1660. The civil wars were fought on the page as intensely as on the battlefield, producing an outpouring of rich and diverse literature, including (to barely scratch the surface): the poetry and prose of John Milton, Andrew Marvell, the cavalier poets, Katherine Philips, Margaret Cavendish, Lucy Hutchinson, Gerrard Winstanley, Thomas Hobbes, the Earl of Clarendon, Marchamont Nedham. This vibrant and important body of writing was, for much of the 20th century, neglected and poorly understood. The closure of the theaters in 1642, the collapse of royal court culture, and a critical fashion that dismissed writing sullied by political engagement: these factors all produced the illusion of a hiatus in the literary tradition, a “cavalier winter.” These misplaced assumptions, however, have been overturned since the 1980s by a new wave of scholarly interest, galvanized by a renewed recognition of the value and excitement of politically engaged writing. Scholarship informed by different branches of historicism, combining literary criticism variously with New Historicism, with the history of political thought, with social history, and with book history, have all transformed our appreciation of civil war literature. As such, work by historicist critics—and by historians—is inescapably central to this bibliography, and fundamental to our understanding of the period’s literature. But, as will become apparent, plenty of space remains for a diversity of approaches including gender studies, queer studies, critical theory, reception studies, and formalism. This bibliography is organized thematically, rather than around major individual authors, of whom there are many, most of whom appear in multiple sections. For this reason, no attempt has been made to include scholarly editions, though reader-friendly anthologies are listed, many of which make valuable scholarly contributions. Key studies on politics and literature appear in Literature and Politics: Essential Studies, followed by more focused sections on royalism, cavalier poetry, republicanism, and Cromwellian writing. Other sections cover scholarship on printing and pamphleteering, on radicalism, on women’s writing, on gender and sexuality, on drama, and on international and colonial contexts.