The Literature of Controversy

Polemical Strategy from Milton to Junius

Thomas N. Corns

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9781032357751
• eBook ISBN: 9781000733716
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

First published in 1987, The Literature of Controversy is a collection of essays by scholars from Britain, the United States, and Australia on major works from a classic epoch of English controversial prose. Each essay engages a single text or series of texts, less to discuss the ideas and arguments per se than to consider the rhetorical techniques assumed for the political manipulation of the readers. Though emphasis varies from contribution to contribution, the purpose, broadly, is to explore how the constituents of those texts are organised to coax, cajole, persuade or inspire those to whom they address. As the editor argues in his introduction, this approach, the critique of polemical strategy, for the most part accepts the validity of paying regard to the author and his intentions; it engages questions about the responses of the readership at which the texts were targeted; and it proceeds intertextuality in its attempts to reconstruct the controversies in which the texts were embedded and the codes within which they operated. This book will be of interest to students of literature, rhetoric and history.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction
• Milton’s Areopagitica: Liberty for the Sects
• Richard Overton’s Marpriest Tracts: Towards a History of Leveller Style
• How to be a Literary Reader of Hobbes’s Most Famous Chapter
• Something to the Purpose: Marvell’s Rhetorical Strategy in The Rehearsal Transpros’d
• The Autobiographer as Apologist: Reliquiae Baxterianae (1696)
• Defoe’s Shortest Way with Dissenters: Irony, Intention and Reader-Response
• “In the case of David”: Swift’s Drapier’s Letters
• Junius and the Grafton Administration, 1768–1770