Fortification and Its Discontents from Shakespeare to Milton

Trouble in the Walled City

Adam N. McKeown

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9780815363699
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351108492
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Fortification and Its Discontents from Shakespeare to Milton gives new coherence to the literature of the early modern Atlantic world by placing it in the context of radical changes to urban space following the Italian War of 1494-1498. The new walled city that emerged in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries on both sides of the Atlantic provided an outlet for a wide range of humanistic fascinations with urban design, composition, and community organization, but it also promoted centrality of control and subordinated the human environment to military functionality. Examining William Shakespeare, Edmund Spenser, John Winthrop, and John Milton, this volume shows how the literature of England and New England explores and challenges the new walled city as England struggled to define the sprawling metropolis of London, translate English urban spaces into Ireland and North America, and, later, survive a long civil war.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• Introduction: A Walled Town and a Village
• 1 Walls of Stone and Walls of Bone in Shakespeare’s Histories
• 2 Spenser, the Fortress City, and the Plot for Ulster
• 3 The Walled City and the Colonization of North America: La Rochelle, Boston, Quebec
• 4 Paradise Lost and the Fortifications of Civil War London
• 5 Conclusion: The Connecticut Experiment
• Works Cited
• Index