1. For an insightful elaboration of this point, see H. D. Harootunian, "Prologue: Historians' Discourse and the Problems of Nativism," in Things Seen and Unseen: Discourse and Ideology in Tokugawa Nativism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), pp. 1-22.

2. Gayatri Spivak briefly summarizes the disagreement between Derrida and Foucault in her preface to Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), pp. lix-lxii. At the time, she notes that Derrida's 1963 critique was aimed at "a dated Foucault, the Foucault of the sixties" (lx). In his "Cogito and the History of Madness," in Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), pp. 31-63, Derrida specifically critiques the Foucault of Madness and Civilization for pretending to know a consciousness not his own that exists on the other side of language. Foucault responded to this critique in "Mon Corps, ce papier, ce feu," published in the second edition of Histoire de la folie à l'âge classique (Paris: Gallimard, 1972), pp. 583-603; but his Discipline and Punish, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage, 1979; first published in French, 1975), and The History of Sexuality, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Pantheon, 1978; first published in French in 1976), address the heart of the problem that beset his earlier project. The later works do not, as far as we can see, take consciousness as the object of knowledge but trace the production of that object in and through writing. See also Ann Wordsworth, "Derrida and Foucault: Writing the History of Historicity," in Post-Structuralism and the Question of History, ed. Derek Attridge, Geoff Bennington, and Robert Young (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), pp. 116-25.

3. This is not to say that writing is the same thing as discourse. Indeed, as Geoff Bennington argues in "Demanding History," in Post-Structuralism and the Question of History, pp. 15-29, collapsing the terms is no way to save deconstruction for marxism. We would argue that deconstruction's attack on the sign as the sign of what is not and never was there, is, indeed, as Bennington contends, "the most historical of discourses imaginable" (17).

4. In Desire and Domestic Fiction (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), for example, Nancy Armstrong shows that the woman-centered household of middle-class culture existed in writing fifty to seventy-five years before it organized everyday life for the range of people from gentry to small independent farmers and shopkeepers we now call middle-class or even for select groups within this class.

5. Hayden White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973), p. xi.

6. Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981).

7. For an interesting critique of the current tendency to set the hegemonic against the counterhegemonic possibilities of narrative, see Jochen Schulte-Sasse, "Introduction" and "Can the Disempowered Read Mass-Produced Narratives in Their Own Voice?" Cultural Critique 10 (1988): 5-18, 171-99.

8. In this book, we will use such terms as "ruling ideas," "discourse," "literacy," and "cultural capital" analogically and, on occasion, interchangeably, depending on the materials under discussion.

9. Michel Foucault, "The Subject and Power," afterword to Hubert Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow, Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), pp. 208-26. The quote is on p. 211. ("Conscience" may be a misleading translation of the French conscience, by which Foucault probably meant something more like "consciousness.")

10. Rather than observe the marxist division of history based on modes of production—feudalism or capitalism—we have adopted the terms "early modern" and "modern" commonly used by social historians. Because it designates the early seventeenth century as a period that was neither medieval nor modern, the term "early modern" allows us to grant importance to the fact that English culture underwent some kind of transformation which marked the onset of modernity.

11. In tracing the use of the term in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Paul Christianson has argued that it should be reserved to describe a very small number of people; it is misleading to apply the term "puritan" to most of the reformist movements within the English church. See his "Reformers and the Church of England Under Elizabeth I and the Early Stuarts," Journal of Ecclesiastical History 31 (1980): 462-82.

12. Our notion of the Imaginary Puritan was helped along by two provocative adaptations of the Lacanian "imaginary." Our earliest speculations along these lines were prompted by Anthony Wilden's The Imaginary Canadian: An Examination for Discovery (Vancouver: Pulp Press, 1980), where he replaced Barthes's concept of "mythology" with "imaginary" to suggest the same thing at a macro level. Wilden expiains that although he first came to know about the "imaginary" from his translation of Jacques Lacan's Language of the Self (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1968), his own use of the ''concept of Imaginary relations is not derived from the same source as Lacan's.... The relationships it refers to are primarily social and economic relations, rather than 'psychoanalytic' ones. lndeed, if we now look back at the social and economic analysis of capitalism in the work of Marx, for example, we find that much of his discussion of the effects of alienation under the power of modern capital is, in retrospect, a discussion of Imaginary relations (notably his analysis of what he called 'the fetishism of commodities')" (63). A study to which we are particularly indebted recuperates an element of Barthes's mythologies that gets lost in Wilden's Anglo-materialism. In Scenarios of the Imaginary: Theorizing the French Enlightenment (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987), Josué V. Harari argues that while the imaginary speaks through images, the conventional notion of the relationship between the image and the real is seriously mistaken. An image, as he explains, "depicts not the real in itself, but rather the real in its absence, that is stripped of reality.... [Such an] image (representation) does not refer back to the real that it allegedly reproduces, but rather points to the real by means of the network of signification it lends to the real." Thus, he concludes, "we must reverse the relationship between thing and image, implying by this reversal that there is no experience of the real without an image . In order for the real to signify, it must borrow its meaning from the image-inary" (58).

13. Thomas Babington Macaulay, "Milton," in Literary Essays: Contributed to the Edinburgh Review (London: Oxford University Press, 1937), p. 45.

14. For accounts of Milton's reputation and influence in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries see John W. Good, "Studies in the Milton Tradition," University of Illinois Studies in Language and Literature 1, nos. 3-4 (1915); R. D. Havens, The Influence of Milton on English Poetry (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1922); Ants Oras, Milton's Editors and Commentators from Patrick Hume to Henry John Todd: A Study in Critical Views (New York: Haskell House, 1964); W. R. Parker, Milton's Contemporary Reputation (New York: Haskell House, 1971); George Sensabaugh, Milton in Early America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1964); John T. Shawcross, ed., Milton: The Critical Heritage (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1970), and Milton, 1732-1801 (London and Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1972); Joseph Wittreich, ed., The Romantics on Milton: Formal Essays and Critical Asides (Cleveland: Press of Case Western Reserve, 1970); Dustin Griffin, Regaining Paradise: Milton and the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), especially pp. 11-42.

15. Macaulay, "Milton," p. 3; T. S. Eliot, "Milton II," in On Poetry and Poets (New York: Farrar, Straus and Cudahy, 1957), p. 168.

16. For two quite different critical perspectives that make this same assertion, see Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth Century Literary Imagination (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), pp. 200-1, and Fredric Jameson, "Religion and Ideology," in 1642: Literature and Power in the Seventeenth Century, ed. Francis Barker, Jay Bernstein, John Coombes, Peter Hulme, Jennifer Stone, and Jon Stratton (Colchester: University of Essex, 1981), p. 335.

17. Roland Barthes, "Myth Today," in Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1972), p. 130.

18. In part III, section iv, of A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, Edmund Burke declares Milton's portrait of Satan to be one of the most perfect examples of a sublime description.

19. Joseph H. Summers, The Muse's Method: An Introduction to Paradise Lost (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1962), pp. 30-32; Harold Bloom, A Map of Misreading (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), pp. 125-26.

20. Sensabaugh, Milton in Early America, pp. 3-4.

21. F. O. Matthiessen, American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1941), p. 103.

22. Robert Weisbuch notes that by the nineteenth century such writers as Shakespeare and Milton were viewed as part of the common English heritage, "common because it was pre-colonial." To this end he quotes Cooper: "The authors, previously to the revolution, are common property, and it is quite idle to say that the American has not just as good a right to claim Milton, and Shakespeare, and all the old masters of the language, for his countrymen, as an Englishman." Atlantic Double-Cross: American Literature and British Literature in the Age of Emerson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), pp. 16-17.

23. Quoted in Matthiessen, American Renaissance, p. 103.

24. Toward the end of the nineteenth century, for example, there was a revival of the movement to discover—more accurately, to insist upon—the Englishness of the American past by invoking the Anglo-Saxon origins supposedly common to both. This racial movement extended from folklore studies and literary scholarship to the writing of revisionist accounts of American history. Peter Novick has argued that among historians this movement expressed both a reaction to the waves of immigration from southern and eastern Europe and a desire to justify American imperialism. It became accepted practice to discover the racial influence of an originary Anglo-Saxon culture in "pure" American politics and institutions. Thus, for example, Edward Channing in his popular six-volume history of the United States claimed that the "English race" was responsible for our political system, while other historians described the American Revolution as a regrettable quarrel among "race brothers" and sought to make amends for the "race feud" that had torn ''two kindred peoples" apart. During and immediately following the First World War, a similar racism apparently prompted a number of historians to establish a common heritage for England and America in the Anglo-Saxon love of liberty. The quoted material as well as the examples from American history come from Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: The "Objectivity Question" and the American Historical Profession (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 81-82. The same ideology can be found in the history of English literary studies. Among his examples of efforts, during this period of superpatriotism, to blur the distinctions between English and American literature, Gerald Graff includes a college textbook edited by two Renaissance scholars, Edwin Greenlaw and James Holly Hanford. Published in 1919, this anthology was jingoistically titled The Great Tradition: Selections from English and American Prose and Poetry, Illustrating the National Ideals of Freedom, Faith, and Conduct . Of the introduction, Graff writes: "The editors described the selections as 'landmarks in the march of the Anglo-Saxon mind from the beginning of the modern period.'" Professing Literature: An Institutional History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), p. 130.

25. In Shakespeare's Perjured Eye (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), Joel Fineman describes Shakespeare as having the kind of mind that, we are claiming, Milton embodies for modern readers. Fineman's ingenuity paints Shakespeare as an anomaly in his age though not in ours. Perhaps it is because Paradise Lost formulates a self-enclosed, internally coherent individual only in the last two books that generations of critics have felt compelled to translate the discontinuities of the poem into contradictions within the personality of its author.

26. It should be acknowledged that Hayden White's Metahistory informs chapters 2 and 3. It is difficult to imagine our performing those "readings" of history without his ground-breaking work.

27. Our readers will find a variable use of the third-person singular pronoun. We saw no way around it and resolved at the first moment of awkwardness to offer the following explanation. To refer to the generic "individual" of early modern culture or the individual represented in writings of the period, we use the generic male pronoun. In the interests of historical accuracy, "he" in these instances does not refer to males in general but to those males who were members of the elite class of people that comprised Milton's audience for the poetry he wrote prior to 1645, and whose codes of conduct that poetry authorized. It would be impossible to say just whom Milton imagined he was addressing in his late poetry, but it is certainly neither the laboring man he portrays in books XI and XII of Paradise Lost nor the rational man of Lockean political theory and epistemology. In the early eighteenth century, the latter had certainly become the referent for the masculine pronoun, but we do not substitute the modern "he or she." Unless the pronoun refers to female, pronoun references to the ''individual" or "reader" would be understood to designate male individuals and readers, and we have chosen to remain faithful to that meaning of "he." Only in cases where those who refer to "readers" are referring to both male and female do we use the form "he or she."

28. On this point, see Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall, Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class, 1780-1850 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987).

29. For a sophisticated reconsideration of the relationship between literature and other aspects of historical change, see John Frow, Marxism and Literary History (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986), pp. 103-24.

30. Joan Wallach Scott, "On Language, Gender, and Working-Class History," Gender and the Politics of History (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), pp. 53-67.

1. Roland Barthes, "Myth Today," in Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1972), p. 135.

2. Douglas Bush, English Literature in the Earlier Seventeenth Century, 1600-1660 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1945), pp. 359-60.

3. In his 1948 presidential address to the Modern Language Association, Bush defined his own practice in contrast with that of the critic—by whom he meant the New Critic—as one in which the scholar tries to view a text "through the minds of its author and his contemporaries." Douglas Bush, "The New Criticism: Some Old-Fashioned Queries," PMLA 64, supplement (1949): 18-21. For a discussion of the circumstances of this speech, see Gerald Graff, Professing Literature: An Institutional History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), pp. 183-90.

4. By the same token, Bush, like many historical critics of his generation, seems never to have questioned the modernity of his own aesthetic. Instead, he proclaimed a belief in the unchanging "conception of poetry which reigned for some 2,500 years, through the greatest periods of literature." Quoted in Graff, Professing Literature, p. 186.

5. Balachandra Rajah, Paradise Lost and the Seventeenth Century Reader (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1967; first published 1947), p. 21.

6. Joseph H. Summers, The Muse's Method: An Introduction to Paradise Lost (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1962), p. 30.

7. Summers specifically draws the comparison between Milton and Henry James: "Milton anticipated, I believe, one of Henry James's favourite and most successful devices for involving the reader directly in the moral action of his stories, the technique of the 'guilty reader.' In The Aspern Papers, The Wings of the Dove, and in a number of the stories, James managed to seduce all but the most attentive readers into identifying initially with a point of view which seems sensible and, if not absolutely good, at least human and sympathetic" (30-31).

8. Stanley E. Fish, Surprised by Sin: The Reader in Paradise Lost (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971), p. xiii.

9. For an insightful reading of Fish's place within an American tradition of pluralist criticism, see Ellen Rooney, Seductive Reasoning: Pluralism as the Problematic of Contemporary Literary Theory (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989). Rooney points out that a flight from history characterizes a variety of pluralist critics (235).

10. Louis L. Martz, Poet of Exile: A Study of Milton's Poetry (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980), p. 79.

11. Harold Bloom, A Map of Misreading (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), p. 125.

12. In a trenchant article on American poetry, "Poetry in America: The Question of Gender," Genre 22 (1987): 153-70, Maria Irene Ramalho de Sousa Santos argues that Bloom's theory that every poem desires to redefine its own origins reproduces an essentially American trope. She writes, "The specificity of American poetry in Bloom's theory is, therefore, that it deliberately ignores its own belatedness, and offers its repetitions as immaculate beginnings, knowing that they are repetitions. Between actual posteriority and the willful ignorance thereof, between experiences of life with death as term and the myth of boundless innocence (or first origin) as illusion of immortality, American poetry goes on reinventing the language" (155-56).

13. It is because we are interested in the discursive Milton that our argument does not directly engage the rich and complex debate over Milton's treatment of women that has commanded the attention of some of our best Milton scholars for at least fifteen years. Among the articles and books we consulted are Marcia Landy, "Kinship and the Role of Women in Paradise Lost, " Milton Studies 4 (1972): 3-18; Barbara K. Lewalski, "Milton on Women—Yet Once More," Milton Studies 6 (1974): 4-20; Sandra M. Gilbert, "Patriarchal Poetry and Women Readers: Reflections on Milton's Bogey," PMLA 93 (1978): 368-82; David Aers and Bob Hodge, "'Rational Burning': Milton on Sex and Marriage,'' Milton Studies 13 (1979): 3-33; Joan Webber, "The Politics of Poetry: Feminism and Paradise Lost, " Milton Studies 14 (1980): 3-24; Christine Froula, "When Eve Reads Milton: Undoing the Canonical Economy," Critical Inquiry 10 (1983): 321-47, and her response, "Pechter's Spector: Milton's Bogey Writ Small; or, Why Is He Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" Critical Inquiry 11 (1984): 171-78; Diane Kelsey McColley, Milton's Eve (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1983); Mary Nyquist, "Gynesis, Genesis, Exegesis, and the Formation of Milton's Eve," in Cannibals, Witches, and Divorce: Estranging the Renaissance, ed. Marjorie Garber (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), pp. 146-208, and "The Genesis of Gendered Subjectivity in the Divorce Tracts and in Paradise Lost, " in Re-Membering Milton: Essays on the Texts and Traditions, ed. Mary Nyquist and Margaret W. Ferguson (New York: Methuen, 1987), pp. 99-127. For a noble effort at recasting the debate in a historical perspective, see Joseph Wittreich's survey of women readers' responses to Milton between 1700 and 1830 in Feminist Milton (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987).

14. Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), p. 191.

15. On the more general problem of the belief system that supports liberal feminism, see Nancy Armstrong, "The Gender Bind," Genders 3 (1988): 1-23.

16. Herman Rapaport, Milton and the Postmodern (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1983), p. 12.

17. Re-Membering Milton, ed. Nyquist and Ferguson, p. xii.

18. Terry Eagleton, "The God That Failed," in Re-Membering Milton, ed. Nyquist and Ferguson, p. 346.

19. It seems to us that anything represented in aesthetic terms is especially prone to losing historical specificity. The aesthetic object is one that appears to have ceased participating in political conflict and to be meaningful primarily through what it says about the individuated consciousness that moderns attribute to "authors" and "readers." As we argued above, for example, Stanley Fish reads Paradise Lost as the encounter between the two. He personifies historically inaccessible material as the superior consciousness of Milton, the genius, poet, and educator; personifies modern literacy as "the reader"; and then identifies the difference between the two as the degree to which ordinary literacy falls short of the kind of learning it takes to be a humanist scholar.

20. Fredric Jameson, "Religion and Ideology," in 1642: Literature and Power in the Seventeenth Century, ed. Francis Barker, Jay Bernstein, John Coombes, Peter Hulme, Jennifer Stone, and Jon Stratton (Colchester: University of Essex, 1981), pp. 315-36.

21. David Norbrook, Poetry and Politics in the English Renaissance (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1984), p. 239.

22. One can clearly see this language in the notion of the social contract later elaborated by Rousseau. But, as we will show in chapter 6, perhaps nowhere is this language more deliberately employed than in the twin discourses of property and understanding theorized by Locke.

23. Harold Perkin notes: "There is no English word for bourgeoisie because, until the nineteenth century at least, the thing itself did not exist, in the sense of a permanent, self-conscious urban class in opposition to the landed aristocracy. In every generation the richer citizens and townsmen who, if socially frustrated, might have galvanized their neighbours into a powerful class were themselves transmuted into country gentlemen, thus making room for other townsmen at the top, and setting in train a general upward movement." The Origins of Modern English Society, 1780-1880 (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1969), p. 61.

24. Quoted in Michael Zuckerman, "Identity in British America," in Colonial Identity in the Atlantic World, 1500-1800, ed. Nicholas Canny and Anthony Pagden (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987), p. 116.

25. Renato Rosaldo, "Imperialist Nostalgia," in Culture and Truth: The Remaking of Social Analysis (Boston: Beacon Press, 1989), pp. 68-87.

26. For a discussion of the process by which this group came to dominance, see Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall, Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class, 1780-1850 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987).

27. On the role the idea of the skin plays in imagining the body, see Julia Kristeva, The Power of Horror, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984).

1. For an extended discussion of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century use of the word "revolution" in historical writing, see R. C. Richardson, The Debate on the English Revolution Revisited (London: Routledge, 1988), pp. 65-86, and Michael G. Finlayson, Historians, Puritanism, and the English Revolution: The Religious Factor in English Politics before and after the Interregnum (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1983), pp. 1-76.

2. Finlayson cites the example of the Tory critic J. W. Croker, who was angered at what he considered Guizot's confusion between the events of the civil war and the Commonwealth period, on the one hand, and those of the Glorious Revolution, on the other. Croker wrote, "I admit that the first helped to produce the other as a dungheap helps to produce asparagus, as filth produces food, but they are not the same thing" (24).

3. François Guizot, "Introductory Discourse on the History of the Revolution of England," History of the English Revolution of 1640: From the Accession of Charles I to His Death, trans. William Hazlitt (London: George Bell and Sons, 1878), p. 1.

4. "A Review of Guizot's Book, 'Why Has the English Revolution Been Successful?'" in Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Articles on Britain (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1971), p. 95.

5. Finlayson, Historians, pp. 21-22.

6. Hume, as J. G. A. Pocock has argued, cannot be considered a "vulgar" Whig historian, for he believed that at least three constitutions could be identified in England's past. The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law: A Study of English Historical Thought in the Seventeenth Century, A Reissue with a Retrospect (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), p. 376.

7. R. C. Richardson notes of Gardiner, "his religious affiliations had kept him out of Oxford in earlier life and for years he had to submit to the drudgery of schoolteaching to eke out a living.... He had an Oxford research fellowship by 1884, was offered (and declined) the Regius Chair ten years later."(82).

8. On narrative strategies employed in nineteenth-century historiography, see Hayden White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973).

9. Samuel Rawson Gardiner, ed., The Constitutional Documents of the Puritan Revolution, 1625-1660 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1906), p. x.

10. In his summary view of Charles at the end of The History of the Great Civil War, 1642-1649 (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1894), Gardiner elaborates this view: "Even on the scaffold he reminded his subjects that a share in government was nothing appertaining to the people. It was the tragedy of Charles's life that he was entirely unable to satisfy the cravings of those who inarticulately hoped for the establishment of a monarchy which while it kept up the old traditions of the country ... would yet allow the people of the country to be to some extent masters of their own destiny" (4:327).

11. Matthew Arnold identifies a similar feature as essentially English. Unlike Gardiner, however, Arnold thinks that such desire leads straight to anarchy: "[According to Jacob Bright, the MP from Manchester] the central idea of English life and politics is the assertion of personal liberty . Evidently this is so; but evidently, also, as feudalism ... dies out, and we are left with nothing but our system of checks, and our notion of its being the great right and happiness of an Englishman to do as far as possible what he likes, we are in danger of drifting towards anarchy. We have not the notion, so familiar on the Continent and to antiquity, of the State —the nation in its collective and corporate character, entrusted with stringent powers for the general advantage, and controlling individual wills in the name of an interest wider than that of individuals." Culture and Anarchy, ed. J. Dover Wilson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), pp. 74-75.

12. Gardiner, Constitutional Documents, p. x.

13. There are a small number of contemporary historians who still refuse to use the word "revolution" to describe the events of the mid-seventeenth century. They understand their views to be iconoclastic. See, for example, Ivan Root, "The Late Troubles in England" (Inaugural lecture delivered at the University of Essex, 1969), pp. 8-10. The most famous example of this practice is Peter Laslett's The World We Have Lost: England before the Industrial Revolution (New York: Scribners, 1970).

14. Lawrence Stone. "The Results of the English Revolutions of the Seventeenth Century," in Three British Revolutions: 1641, 1688, 1776, ed. J. G. A. Pocock (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), p. 62.

15. Perez Zagorin, Rebels and Rulers, 1500-1600, vol. 2, Provincial Rebellion: Revolutionary Civil Wars, 1560-1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), p. 185.

16. Lawrence Stone holds a similar position: "For a short time, and perhaps for the first time, there came onto the stage of history a group of men proclaiming ideas of liberty not liberties, equality not privilege, fraternity not deference. These ideas were to live on, and to revive again in other societies in other ages." The Causes of the English Revolution, 1529-1642 (New York: Harper and Row, 1972), p. 146. This view is echoed by Christopher Hill's claim, "So although the Puritan revolution was defeated, the revolution in thought could not be unmade." The Century of Revolution: 1603-1714 (New York: Norton, 1980), p. 163. See also Hill's The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas during the English Revolution (London: Penguin, 1975), p. 381. Hill's Some Intellectual Consequences of the English Revolution (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1980) is devoted entirely to this issue.

17. J. H. Hexter, "Power Struggle, Parliament, and Liberty in Early Stuart England," Journal of Modern History 50 (1978): 29.

18. The transhistorical nature of this desire can be seen in J. H. Hexter's declaration that "in the seventeenth century for the first time men tried effectively to limit the power of the state over its subjects in many of the same ways and for precisely the same reasons as we do today." "The Early Stuarts and Parliament: Old Hat and the Nouvelle Vague," Parliamentary History 1 (1982): 208.

19. For the classic formulation of this belief, see Christopher Hill, "The Norman Yoke," in Puritanism and Revolution: Studies in Interpretation of the English Revolution (London: Secker and Warburg, 1965), pp. 50-122.

20. The English Revolution: An Essay (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1955; originally published 1940). In this early version of his argument, Hill explicitly describes this class as a middle class (135). For an account of Hill's consistent historiographic assumptions, see Harvey J. Kaye, The British Marxist Historians (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1984), pp. 99-130.

21. Christopher Hill, "A Bourgeois Revolution?" in Three British Revolutions, ed. Pocock, p. 111. This has been perhaps the most persistent proposition in Hill's theory of the English Revolution for over fifty years. In one of his earliest pieces, Hill quotes Engels's Anti-Dühring on this point: "This mighty revolution in the economic conditions of society was not followed by any immediate corresponding change in its political structure. The state order remained feudal, while society became more and more bourgeois." Hill, English Revolution, p. 140. The concept of a bourgeois revolution has been challenged by various scholars. See, for example, Lawrence Stone, "The Bourgeois Revolution of Seventeenth-Century England Revisited," Past and Present 109 (1985): 44-54.

22. Conrad Russell, "Parliamentary History in Perspective, 1604-1629," History 61 (1976): 3. For a more complete account of Russell's position, see his Parliaments and English Politics, 1621-1629 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979). When Russell challenged the notion that there was such a thing as an opposition to the Crown in Parliament, he touched a nerve among historians. Since Gardiner's magisterial account, most renderings of the seventeenth century had represented the origins of the English Revolution in terms of one or another simple opposition: Puritans versus Anglicans, Parliament (by which was usually meant the Commons) versus the Crown, city versus country, and so on. Such an opposition is particularly useful if one is going to produce a progressive or evolutionary emplotment to the historical narrative. Apparently the need for this sort of opposition is so compelling that Theodore K. Rabb, for example, has argued that even if Russell were correct in disputing the existence of any clear political opposition, there were nonetheless disputes, conflicts, and thus "opposition beliefs." "The Role of Commons," Past and Present 92 (1981): 55-78. See also Derek Hirst, "Parliament, Law, and War in the 1620s," Historical Journal 23 (1980): 455-62 as well as his Authority and Conflict: England, 1603-1658 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986), pp. 126-59, especially pp. 135 and 149-50.

23. The year following the publication of Russell's provocative essay in History, the Journal of Modern History 49 (1977) devoted an issue to largely revisionist views of the English Revolution. This issue included essays by Paul Christianson, "The Peers, the People, and Parliamentary Management in the First Six Months of the Long Parliament"; James E. Farnell, "The Social and Intellectual Basis of London's Role in the English Civil Wars"; and Mark Kishlansky, "The Emergence of Adversary Politics in the Long Parliament." Another example of this kind of work that appeared at the same time is Kevin Sharpe, "Introduction: Parliamentary History, 1603-1629,'' in Faction and Parliament: Essays in Early Stuart History, ed. Kevin Sharpe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), pp. 1-42.

24. Russell begins his essay by comparing the traditional historian to a man who reads the last chapter of a detective story first. The historian is thus always at risk "of letting hindsight lead him to see the evidence out of perspective," and doing so is "particularly tempting for historians who describe the years before the revolution." "Parliamentary History in Perspective," p. 1.

25. Christianson, "The Peers, the People, and Parliamentary Management."

26. John Morrill, The Revolt of the Provinces: Conservatives and Radicals in the English Civil War, 1630-1650 (London: Longman, 1976); Anthony Fletcher, The Outbreak of the English Civil War (London: Arnold, 1981). See also John Morrill and J. D. Walter, "Order and Disorder in the English Revolution," in Order and Disorder in Early Modern England, ed. Anthony Fletcher and John Stevenson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), pp. 136-65.

27. Mark Kishlansky, The Rise of the New Model Army (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979).

28. Mark Kishlansky, Parliamentary Selection: Social and Political Choice in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986). Kishlansky challenges positions such as that of Derek Hirst. In The Representatives of the People: Voters and Voting in England Under the Stuarts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), Hirst claimed that Parliament had come to represent the political and ideological interests of the electorate; Kishlansky insists that "before 1640 ideology was absent from the process of parliamentary selection," and members were elected for local reasons (16).

29. Paul Christianson, "Reformers and the Church of England under Elizabeth I and the Early Stuarts," Journal of Ecclesiastical History 31 (1980): 463-82. Unhappy with the way historians since Gardiner had used the term to indicate a political/religious opposition to Anglican practice, Christianson limits "puritan" "to exclude all but those reformers who worked within the Established Church for ministerial parity and a severely attenuated liturgy" (481).

30. Lawrence Stone, "The Century of Revolution," New York Review of Books 34 (February 26, 1987): 43. For equally strong attacks that seek to protect the traditional Whig/liberal accounts of Parliament and the emergence of representative democracy against the charge of an ideological bias, see Hexter, "Power Struggle," and especially his "Early Stuarts and Parliament." See also "Revisionism Revised: Two Perspectives on Early Stuart Parliamentary History,'' 1: Rabb, "Role of Commons," and 2: Derek Hirst, "The Place of Principle," Past and Present 92 (1981): 79-97; Christopher Hill, "Parliament and People in Seventeenth-Century England," Past and Present 92 (1981): 100-124. Mary Fulbrook has tried to reinscribe the revisionist critique within those very approaches that revisionism critiques, "The English Revolution and the Revisionist Revolt," Social History 7 (1982): 249-65.

31. Christopher Hill, "Under the Tudor Bed," New York Review of Books 34 (March 13, 1987): 36.

32. J. C. D. Clark, Revolution and Rebellion: State and Society in England in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986).

33. For an exchange on Clark's historiographical assumptions, see Joanna Innes, "Jonathan Clark, Social History and England's 'Ancien Regime,'" Past and Present 115 (1987): 165-200 and Jonathan Clark, "On Hitting the Buffers: The Historiography of England's Ancien Regime," Past and Present 117 (1987): 195-207.

34. The effect of the revisionist assault has been such, Barry Coward has written, that "there is ... a danger of suggesting that the consequences of what happened between 1640 and 1660 were either totally negative or irrelevant in explaining many later developments in England." When Coward turns then to justify his own use of the phrase "the English Revolution," he is noticeably defensive: "My case for keeping the phrase 'the English Revolution' is not so much that the period did see some undeniably revolutionary events, especially in the winter of 1648-49, but that it is the one that is now most widely used by historians writing on the 1640's and 1650's. Those who use it are not necessarily waving an ideological banner." "Was There an English Revolution in the Middle of the Seventeenth Century?" in Politics and People in Revolutionary England, ed. Colin Jones, Malyn Newitt, and Stephen Roberts (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986), p. 10.

35. Roland Barthes, "Myth Today," in Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1972), p. 138.

36. We are taking Benedict Anderson's suggestion in Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983) and assuming that the form a nation is generally believed to have is only imagined as such by particular groups of its citizens. By the same token, those who write a nation's history extrapolate a certain collective or corporate body from the information preserved or handed down by those groups, even when such authors consider that the nation is a complex entity made up of different regions, status groups, and dialects. Histories of seventeenth-century England invariably begin with the assumption that the events of that period produced a nation defined by neither its aristocracy nor its rural poor but by the "middling sort."

37. This is also known as "history from below." Such histories focus on oppositional political practices at the local level and upon forms of religious radicalism that challenged those of the ruling elites. Typical is the thrust of Clive Holmes's essay, that "it was 'the middling sort' of the fenland villages—minor gentry, yeomen, richer husbandmen, some tradesmen—who played the crucial role in organising the local resistance, including riots, to the drainers' activities" (186). "Drainers and Fenmen: The Problem of Popular Political Consciousness in the Seventeenth Century," in Order and Disorder, ed. Fletcher and Stevenson, pp. 166-95. Other examples of such history include David Underdown, Revel, Riot, and Rebellion: Popular Politics and Culture in England, 1603-1660 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987); Radical Religion in the English Revolution, ed. J. F. McGregor and B. Reay (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987); Popular Culture in Seventeenth-Century England, ed. Barry Reay (London: Croom Helm, 1985); and Hill, World Turned Upside Down . For a brief survey, see Richardson, Debate on the English Revolution Revisited, 173-86.

38. The closing paragraph of Wolfe's study captures this concept of Milton as radical humanist:

The identification of personal sin with man's political failures in Paradise Lost throws into sharp relief Milton's rich contributions to the progressive thought of the Puritan Revolution. In contrast to the political implications of his great epic, these contributions were secular in the main and humanistic. The timeless arguments for intellectual liberty found in Areopagitica transcend all theological creeds; they breathe, indeed, a revolutionary fervor that would open all creeds to pitiless criticism, leaving no institution unchallenged, no social assumption static or secure.... This humanism, together with his extreme Protestant individualism, drove him away from the royalists and the Presbyterians, justified the toleration and republicanism of the Independents, and sustained the democratic arguments of The Tenure and The Defense . To go further than this Milton's environment and training and his theological convictions forbade. Here was his place in the Puritan Revolution.

Don M. Wolfe, Milton in the Puritan Revolution (New York: Humanities Press, 1963; first published 1941), p. 351.

39. Christopher Hill, Milton and the English Revolution (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1979). The dedication reads: "This book is dedicated in gratitude to the memory of Don M. Wolfe, who devoted a lifetime to the study of Milton, but never forgot Richard Overton and Gerrard Winstanley" (v).

40. Hill, Century of Revolution, p. 163.

41. Hill, "A Bourgeois Revolution?" p. 111.

42. Hill, Century of Revolution, p. 163.

43. Hill, Milton and the English Revolution, p. 63.

44. Hill assumes that this so-called third culture was inherently oppositional and progressive except when debased by "the intellectuals of lower-class origin" who wanted to get on in the world. As E. P. Thompson pointed out in "The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century," Past and Present 50 (1971): 76-136, and in "Eighteenth-Century English Society: Class Struggle without Class," Social History 3 (1978): 133-65, there was nothing inherently progressive about protests initiated by the lower social orders. In the seventeenth century as in the eighteenth, their activity, their interests, and their ideas could often be in alliance with those of court and king against the political elites of village, town, and city. The Declaration of Sports by James I and later by Charles I, Dover's Cotswold Games, royal encouragement of church ales, morris dances, and maypole festivities, and the implicit support for traditional forms of recreation and pastimes were aimed at curtailing the effectiveness of the reformers. It produced an alliance of sorts between those at the top and those at the lower end of the social hierarchy. On this point, see Underdown, Revel, Riot, and Rebellion, pp. 44-72, and Leah S. Marcus, The Politics of Mirth: Jonson, Herrick, Milton, Marvell and the Defense of Old Holiday Pastimes (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986).

45. Hill has always used the language of class to characterize seventeenth-century society. In "Parliament and People," he responded to those of his critics who faulted him for using a nineteenth-century classification system to describe social relations in the seventeenth century. As he explains, some argue that "it is inappropriate to talk in terms of class in the seventeenth century, because contemporaries had no such word in their vocabulary. There are those who argue that we not speak of revolution in seventeenth-century England because the language had no word for it. But people can experience things before they invent a name for them" (117).

46. Hill, Milton and the English Revolution, p. 462.

47. Barthes, "Myth Today," p. 130.

48. Even Herbert Marcuse uses Milton to characterize the first individualist: "The principle of individualism, the pursuit of self-interest, was conditioned upon the proposition that self-interest was rational, that is to say, that it resulted from and was constantly guided and controlled by autonomous thinking.... In the context of radical Puritanism, the principle of individualism thus set the individual against his society.... The theme has nowhere been more fittingly expressed than in Milton's image of a 'wicked race of deceivers, who ... took the virgin Truth, hewd her lovely form into a thousand peeces, and scatter'd them to the four winds. From that time ever since, the sad friends of Truth, such as durst appear, imitating the careful search that Isis made for the mangl'd body of Osiris, went up and down gathering up limb by limb still as they could find them.'" "Some Social Implications of Modern Technology," in The Essential Frankfurt School Reader, ed. Andrew Arato and Eike Gebhardt (New York: Continuum, 1987), p. 140.

49. Hill writes in a passage that is intended to sum up the accomplishments of the English Revolution: "A great revolution. Absolute monarchy on the French model was never again possible. The instruments of despotism, Star Chamber and High Commission, were abolished for ever. Strafford has been described as a frustrated Richelieu; the frustration of all that Strafford stood for was complete and final." Century of Revolution, p. 161.

50. Hill, Milton and the English Revolution, p. 65.

51. As David Masson noted over a century ago, however, there was a great deal published during these years which simply ignored the Licensing Order. Milton's own antiprelatical tracts are a case in point. David Masson, The Life of John Milton (Gloucester: Peter Smith, 1965), 3:266-69.

52. These constraints are discussed in Ernest Sirlock's introduction to the Complete Prose Works of John Milton (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1959), 2:158-64.

53. Lawrence Stone has written: "The revolutionary nature of the English Revolution is perhaps even more convincingly demonstrated by its words than by its deeds. The mere fact that it was such an extraordinarily wordy revolution—well over 22,000 sermons, speeches, pamphlets and newspapers were published between 1640 and 1661—would by itself strongly suggest that this is something very different from the familiar protest against an unpopular government." Causes of the English Revolution, pp. 49-50.

54. Williams writes: "As 1688 is a significant political date, so 1695 is significant in the history of the press. For in that year Parliament declined to renew the 1662 Licensing Act, and the stage for expansion was now fully set.... The expansion was not slow in coming for in the years between 1695 and 1730 a public press of three kinds became firmly established: daily newspapers, provincial weekly newspapers, and periodicals. Between them, these new organs covered the whole range of the cultural expansion." Raymond Williams, The Long Revolution (New York: Columbia University Press, 1961), pp. 180-81. For an account of the history of the Licensing Act from 1662 to 1695, see James Sutherland, The Restoration Newspaper and Its Development (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), pp. 2-25.

55. We should also note E. P. Thompson's critique of Perry Anderson and Tom Naim on the grounds that they attempt to see the English Revolution and its aftermath in a monolithic fashion. Thompson is particularly emphatic about the role of literacy in the formation and maintenance of an agrarian capitalism throughout the eighteenth century. "The Peculiarities of the English," in The Poverty of Theory (London: Merlin, 1978), pp. 245-301.

56. Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), p. 97.

1. In what has become one of the standard surveys of the field, Michael Anderson's Approaches to the History of the Western Family (London: Macmillan, 1980) divides historical research on the family into three approaches: the demographic, the affective, and the domestic economic. We discuss examples of the first two schools in this chapter while reserving discussion of the third for chapter 6. We will not observe distinctions quite so precise as Anderson's, however, since in recent years historians in each group have drawn on the research conducted in the other areas. In addition to surveys of the debate on the history of the family discussed in this chapter, other discussions can be found in Tamara K. Hareven, "Modernization and Family History: Perspectives on Social Change," Signs 2 (1976): 190-206; Mary Lyndon Shanley, "The History of the Family in Modern England," Signs 4 (1979): 740-50; Mark Poster, Critical Theory of the Family (New York: Seabury Press, 1979); Stephanie Coontz, The Social Origins of Private Life: A History of the American Family (London: Verso, 1988), pp. 7-40.

2. Keith Wrightson, English Society, 1580-1680 (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1982), p. 73.

3. Ralph A. Houlbrooke, The English Family, 1450-1700 (London and New York: Longman, 1984), p. 156.

4. Michael MacDonald, Mystical Bedlam, Madness, Anxiety, and Healing in Seventeenth-Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), p. 82.

5. Angus McLaren, Reproductive Rituals: The Perception of Fertility in England from the Sixteenth to the Nineteenth Century (London: Methuen, 1984), p. 28.

6. See, for example, Linda A. Pollock, Forgotten Children: Parent-Child Relations from 1500-1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983). In a similar vein is Alan Macfarlane, Marriage and Love in England: Modes of Reproduction, 1300-1840 (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986). This study of expressions of parental joy upon the announcement of pregnancy or birth may be added to the work of Houlbrooke, MacDonald, and McLaren. Indeed Macfarlane's earlier work on the unchanging nature of the individual and the English family system from 1250 to the present day is often cited by historians in support of attempts to place certain aspects of family life outside of history. See his Origins of English Individualism: The Family, Property and Social Transition (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1979) and The Family Life of Ralph Josselin, a Seventeenth-Century Clergyman: An Essay in Historical Anthropology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970). For an important critique of Macfarlane's selection and interpretation of data that extend the middle-class family backward in time, see Stephen D. White and Richard T. Vann, "The Invention of English Individualism: Alan Macfarlane and the Modernization of Premodern England," Social History 8 (1983): 345-63. Seeking to defend her view of children, Linda Pollock finds different grounds for the modern middle-class family's universality, Forgotten Children, pp. 1-32. See also Houlbrooke, English Family, 14-15, and MacDonald, Mystical Bedlam, p. 89 n. 77.

7. Peter Laslett, The World We Have Lost, 2d ed. (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1971). Our citations are to this edition, which has a revised text and updated bibliography and footnotes. The first (1965) and second editions have been the most influential in promoting the sentimental view of the history of the family. Although its argument is consistent with that of the first two editions, the third edition was so substantially rewritten as to require a modification in the title: The World We Have Lost—Further Explored (London: Methuen, 1983).

8. This account of the genesis of Laslett's book is based on the preface to The World We Have Gained: Histories of Population and Social Structure: Essays Presented to Peter Laslett on His Seventieth Birthday, ed. Lloyd Bonfield, Richard M. Smith, and Keith Wrightson (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986), pp. viii-x.

9. In a general note to the second edition, Laslett explains: "The specific source in unpublished documents for the first edition of The World We Have Lost was the embryo of the collection of listings of inhabitants of English communities before 1801, which has now become one of the files (File 3 in the succeeding notes) of the Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure. This file remains the most important for the development of the studies described in an introductory way in the present work, but all the other files of the Group are relevant to them, and have been used in this second edition" (254). Although his book was not written in the format associated with the demographic approach, in it Laslett relies on the same data on which he relies in his later work in historical demographics.

10. Peter Laslett, introduction to Household and Family in Past Time, ed. Peter Laslett and Richard Wall (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972), p. 46.

11. Peter Laslett, "Mean Household Size in England since the Sixteenth Century," in Household and Family in Past Time, ed. Laslett and Wall, p. 127.

12. In the third edition of The World We Have Lost, this statement was dropped; however, all the other passages we quote are retained. Thus the same model of the family continues to inform the third edition.

13. This has proved to be one of the most hotly contested notions Laslett put forward in the book. For a review of the various attacks and counterattacks, see R. S. Neale, Class in English History, 1680-1850 (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1981), pp. 68-99. For an analysis of the paternalistic myth that underlies the Laslett model, see E. P. Thompson, "Eighteenth-century English Society: Class-Struggle without Class?" Social History 3 (1978): 133-65.

14. Laslett writes: "When all allowance has been made for the very different assumptions about the very different kinship relations too, it remains the case that there ordinarily slept together under each roof in 1600 only the nuclear family with the addition of servants when necessary" (249). Laslett finds support for this conclusion in the fact that "the evidence we now have suggests that household size was remarkably constant in England at 4.75 persons per household from the late sixteenth until the early twentieth century" (93). He further elaborates: "No two married couples or more went to make up a family group.... When a son got married he left the family of his parents and started a family of his own" (94). See his "Mean Household Size'' for an account of how he arrived at this conclusion. Neither Laslett's conclusions nor his method have been universally endorsed. For a brief survey of the criticism, see Anderson, Approaches, pp. 27-38. A useful cautionary can be found in Lutz Berkner, "The Stem Family and the Developmental Cycle of the Peasant Household: An Eighteenth-Century Austrian Example," American Historical Review 77 (1972): 398-418. Berkner argues that while statistics may lead one to believe the overwhelming majority of households were organized around a nuclear family, in many societies the nuclear family was in fact a phase through which the extended family passed, or else another model organized the household even when it is not visible as a statistical mean. Also critical of Laslett's normative assumptions is Tamara K. Hareven, "Cycles, Courses, and Cohorts: Reflections of Theoretical and Methodological Approaches to the Historical Study of Family Development," Journal of Social History 12 (1978): 97-109. Another challenge to Laslett's ideological assumptions comes from Miranda Chaytor, "Household and Kinship: Ryton in the Late 16th and Early 17th Centuries," History Workshop Journal 10 (1980): 25-60. Keith Wrightson responds in "Household and Kinship in Sixteenth-Century England," History Workshop Journal 12 (1981): 151-58. A response to Wrightson and Laslett's response on the ideological implications of their demographic categories is offered by Olivia Harris, "Households and Their Boundaries," History Workshop Journal 13 (1982): 143-52.

15. This argument seems to arise on all fronts. For example, in a study of the history of divorce, Putting Asunder: A History of Divorce in Western Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. 362, Roderick Phillips argues that men and women put up with one another—indeed required each other—for economic survival. Thus "expectations were low and flexible, and there was a correspondingly high tolerance of what we might think of as negative behavior." It was the growth of the factory system that made it possible for individuals to survive economically. Phillips does point out that the conjugal relationship had other functions besides the economic one. The entire thesis is doubly suspect, however. Phillips not only assumes that the increase in divorce, "consensual unions," homosexuality, and nontraditional relationships within the last one hundred and fifty years means that industrialization destroyed the family as Laslett imagines it. He also assumes that in earlier cultures men needed women and women needed men to survive economically. Why, one might ask, should heterosexual monogamy be the only basis for ensuring collective survival?

16. The World We Have Lost, p. 167. In a review essay, Christopher Hill declared that every serious historian since the seventeenth century has either agreed with Oliver Cromwell that there was a revolution or with Clarendon that there was a great rebellion. "A One-Class Society," in Change and Continuity in Seventeenth-Century England (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1975), pp. 205-18.

17. Stone declares that what he calls the restricted patriarchal nuclear family "began in about 1530." The Family, Sex and Marriage in England, 1500-1800 (New York: Harper and Row, 1977), p. 7. It is surely more than a coincidence that, without specifying why, Stone dates the origin of the change in family structure close to 1528. His earlier book on the causes of the English Revolution had identified that as the year in which originated the first of the causes of the English civil war.

18. Stone admits that his data favor "a small minority group, namely the literate and articulate classes, and has relatively little to say about the great majority of Englishmen," but he justifies this bias as favoring "the pacemakers of cultural change" (12).

19. In A Little Commonwealth: Family Life in Plymouth Colony (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970), John Demos contends that "from the very beginning of settlement at Plymouth the family was nuclear in its basic composition and it has not changed in this respect ever since" (181). He also assumes that Laslett is essentially correct in his views on the distant history of the nuclear family (62). Thus he does not consider the fact that the founding of Plymouth Colony was a social experiment and that life there was meant to differ in certain important respects from life as it was lived back in England. Even so, his chapter on household membership has to deal with the fact that servants were part of the structure of the family. The mere presence of the "servant" category along with those of "husband," "wife," and "children" in the family should alert us to the fact that this is not exactly the modern nuclear family.

20. Susan Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984), pp. 37-69.

21. Beyond the Pleasure Principle in vol. 18 of The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. and ed. James Strachey, Anna Freud, Alix Strachey, and Alan Tyson (London: Hogarth Press, 1955), 14-16. Freud named this game after observing his grandson's habit of throwing a wooden reel over the edge of the bed to make it disappear ( fort ) and then pulling it back with the attached string to make it appear ( da ). Freud reads the game in this manner: "The interpretation of the game then became obvious. It was related to the child's great cultural achievement—the instinctual renunciation (that is, the renunciation of instinctual satisfaction) which he had made in allowing his mother to go away without protesting. He compensated himself for this, as it were, by himself staging the disappearance and return of the objects within reach" (15).

22. Melanie Klein, Envy and Gratitude (New York: Basic Books, 1957) and Love, Hate, and Reparation (London: Hogarth Press, 1937).

23. Martin Ingram's Church Courts, Sex and Marriage in England, 1570-1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), for example, concludes from the records of church court cases that romantic love motivated individuals during the early modern period (103-26). For an important critique of the assumptions that lie behind E. A. Wrigley and R. S. Schofield's The Population History of England, 1541-1871 (London: Edward Arnold, 1981), see Henry Abelove, "Some Speculations on the History of 'Sexual Intercourse' During the 'Long Eighteenth Century' in England," Genders 6 (1989): 125-30. Typical of the modern assumptions used to make the categories for reading earlier material is Ralph Houlbrooke's English Family Life, 1576-1716: An Anthology from Diaries (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988). Houlbrooke's selections are arranged according to categories that emerged only in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in narratives of personal development: "Courtship and Marriage," "Married Life and Widowhood," "Pregnancy, Childbirth and Infancy," ''Childhood," "Adolescence and Departure from Home," "Parents' Old Age and Deaths," and "Other Kinsfolk."

24. Roland Barthes describes a popular proverb as "a rural statement of fact, such as 'the weather is fine.' " "Myth Today," in Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1972), p. 154.

25. Laslett defines the family for the purposes of a "history of the domestic group" in the introduction to Household and Family in Past Time: "A preliminary definition of the family in this sense in contrast to the other senses which are possible is to be found in everyday experience. The domestic group is the family which the suburban worker leaves when he catches his bus in the morning, and returns to in the evening; it was the family which the English husbandman or petty farmer of our pre-industrial past sat with at table and organised for work in the fields. It consists and consisted of those who share the same physical space for the purposes of eating, sleeping, taking rest and leisure, growing up, childrearing and procreating (those of them belonging to the class of person who society permits to procreate)" (24-25). Stone defines the family on pp. 21-23. In a particularly harsh review of the book, E. P. Thompson shows how "the modern family" is the hero of Stone's study: "The prospective purchaser [of Stone's book] is supposed to squeal excitedly: 'Darling, look, the history of us! ' " "Happy Families," Radical History Review 20 (1979): 42-50 (reprinted from New Society, 8 September 1977, 499-501). The quoted material is found on pp. 43-44.

26. The fact that this model of the family is white as well as elite is demonstrated by its absence from the emergent human sciences; there, other races and ethnicities are seen to lack this particular family structure. See, for example, Anita Levy, "Blood, Kinship, and Gender," Genders 5 (1989): 70-85.

27. Nowhere is this clearer than in Engels's idea of emancipated humanity. He cites with obvious approval Lewis Henry Morgan's answer to the question as to whether this form of the family "can be permanent in the future. The only answer that can be given is that it must advance as society advances, and change as society changes, even as it has done in the past. it is the creation of the social system, and will reflect its culture. As the monogamian family has improved greatly since the commencement of civilization, and very sensibly in modern times, it is at least supposable that it is capable of still further improvement until the equality of the sexes is attained. Should the monogamian family in the distant future fail to answer the requirements of society it is impossible to predict the nature of its successor." Frederick Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State, ed. Evelyn Reed (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1972), p. 89.

28. Barthes, "The Great Family of Man," in Mythologies, p. 100.

29. Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Elementary Structures of Kinship, trans. James Harle Bell and John Richard von Sturmer, ed. Rodney Needham (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969), p. 31.

1. The plague of 1348 is credited with increasing the availability of land by killing off approximately 25 percent of the landlords, and with destroying between one-third and one-half of the labor force. The Ordinance of Labourers (1349) was intended to deal with the labor crisis that ensued. It declared that men and women under the age of sixty had to work when required and accept wages paid at the rates of 1346. Rather than holding down wages as intended, the ordinance simply encouraged laborers to relocate. This led to a collapse of traditional patterns of landholding that, for many scholars, marks the beginning of the early modern period. On this point, see Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, "A Reply to Robert Brenner," in The Brenner Debate: Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in Pre-Industrial Europe, ed. T. H. Aston and C. H. H. Philpin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), p. 103; Robert Brenner, "The Agrarian Roots of European Capitalism," ibid., p. 270; Robert S. Gottfried, The Black Death: Natural and Human Disaster in Medieval Europe (New York: Free Press, 1983), pp. 94-98; Pauline Gregg, Black Death to Industrial Revolution: A Social and Economic History of England (London: Harrap, 1976), pp. 81-88; Bertha Haven Putnam, The Enforcement of the Statutes of Labourers during the First Decade after the Black Death (New York: Columbia University, 1908). Even among historians who argue that declines in the population and the work force had begun earlier in the fourteenth century than the onset of the plague, most seem to hold the view of M. M. Postan, who writes, "The part the Black Death played was greatly to aggravate the mortality in the late 1340's, and to delay the recovery from the demographic decline in a subsequent century or century-anda-half." The Medieval Economy and Society: An Economic History of Britain in the Middle Ages (London: Weidenfield and Nicholson, 1972), p. 38. See also fan Kershaw, "The Great Famine and Agrarian Crisis in England, 1315-1322," in Peasants, Knights and Heretics: Studies in Medieval English Social History, ed. R. H. Hilton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976), pp. 85-132.

2. The Decameron, trans. G. H. McWilliam (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972), p. 60.

3. Although the plague orders drawn up by the Privy Council were largely unchanged from 1578 to 1625, it was not until the act of 1604 that violations of quarantine were made felonies punishable by hanging. Our summary account of the plague orders relies heavily on Paul Slack, The Impact of Plague in Tudor and Stuart England (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1985), pp. 207-16.

4. Stuart Royal Proclamations, vol. 2, Royal Proclamations of King Charles I, 1625-1646, ed. James F. Larkin (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983), p. 35; see also Proclamation 29. For an example during the reign of James I see the proclamation issued 1 November 1606, "forbidding all Londoners and other inhabitants of places infected, to resort to the Court," vol. 1, Royal Proclamations of James I, 1603-1625, ed. James F. Larkin and Paul L. Hughes (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973), 151-52.

5. Such prohibitions were rare and nearly unenforceable. Charles F. Mullett, The Bubonic Plague and England: An Essay in the History of Medicine (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1956), pp. 142-52.

6. The Plague Pamphlets of Thomas Dekker, ed. F. P. Wilson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1925), p. 145.

7. Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Helene Iswolosky (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1968).

8. The same language can be found in other kinds of writing recording the effects of the plague. On 10 September 1625, for example, Joseph Mead transcribed a doctor's account of the effects of the plague on London in a letter for a friend. Particularly noteworthy is the image of the city abandoned by its most prominent inhabitants: "The want and misery is the greatest here ever any man living knew: no trading at all; the rich all gone; housekeepers and apprentices of manual trades begging in the streets, and that in a lamentable manner as will make the strongest heart to yearn." The Court and Times of Charles I, ed. Robert F. Williams (London, 1848), 1:48.

9. Paul Slack, The Impact of the Plague in Tudor and Stuart Times, p. 195.

10. The Economic Writings of Sir William Petty, ed. Charles Henry Hull (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1899), 1:109.

11. That Petty understood the power of the state as being based on the population's capacity to work is perhaps best demonstrated by his Verbum Sapienti, written in 1665 and published in 1691. A chapter entitled "The Value of People" begins with the following calculation: "Now if the Annual proceed of the Stock or wealth of the Nation, yields but 15 millions, and the expence be 40. The labour of the People must furnish the other 25; which may be done, if but half of them, viz. 3 millions earned but 8£.6 s .8 d . per annum, which is done at 7 d . per diem, abating the 52 Sundays, and half as many other days for accidents as Holy days, sickness, recreations, &c." Economic Writings, 1:108.

12. Of considerable importance to Petty's calculations is the fact that the poor are likely to die in greater numbers than any other potential victims of plague. This was clear from the bills of mortality. Three plague pamphlets appearing in 1665 argued for the first time against the practice of quarantine, on the grounds that forced enclosure seemed to breed disease among the poor. See The Shutting up of Infected Houses as it is Practiced in England (1665); Golgotha; or, a Looking-Glass for London and the Suburbs thereof. With an humble Witness against the Cruel Advice and Practice of Shutting up unto Oppression (1665); Directions for the Prevention and Cure of the Plague fitted for the Poorer Sort (1665).

13. Both Graunt and Petty argued that an "exact computation" (Petty's phrase) would make the census more accurate, and hence tax collection more efficient. David Quint has noted that this argument "rests upon the idea of economic rationality that governs king and subject alike." Although Petty was very much a conservative, then, his mathematical conception of the population contradicted the idea that state power originated in the monarch's blood. "David's Census: Milton's Politics and Paradise Regained, " in Re-Membering Milton: Essays on the Texts and Traditions, ed. Mary Nyquist and Margaret W. Ferguson (New York: Methuen, 1987), p. 140.

14. Thomas Sprat, History of the Royal Society, ed. Jackson I. Cope and Harold Whirmore Jones (St. Louis: Washington University Press, 1958), p. 121.

15. We are not suggesting that artisans were a monolithic group. There are data to suggest that they did not in fact constitute a class in any modern sense but were often divided into groups with conflicting economic and political interests. For a study of this phenomenon with regard to French labor history, see Jacques Rancière, "The Myth of the Artisan: Critical Reflections on a Category of Social History," International Labor and Working Class History no. 24 (1983), 1-16, and the responses by William H. Sewell, Jr., Christopher H. Johnson, Edgar Leon Newman, and Nicholas Papayanis, as well as Rancière's reply to his critics, 17-46. See also E. P. Thompson, "Eighteenth-century English Society: Class Struggle without Class?" Social History 3 (1978):133-65.

16. Laura Stevenson has surveyed the materials and finds few descriptions of artisan life after the early years of James's reign. We have drawn upon her findings set forth in Praise and Paradox: Merchants and Craftsmen in Elizabethan Popular Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984). The literature dealing with domestic economy, animal husbandry, and various kinds of practical labor is not discussed in this chapter; we assume that we are dealing with a culture where "work" has not yet become a meaningful category or a way of organizing social relations. Indeed, by lumping them together as "work," middle-class culture would eventually erase the important distinction between the tasks described in practical advice books and the privileged knowledge passed down from artisans to their apprentices.

17. E. P. Thompson has discussed at length the last stages of this process in The Making of the English Working Class (New York: Vintage, 1966).

18. Charles Richard Weld, A History of the Royal Society with Memoirs of the Presidents (London, 1848), 1:138.

19. Sprat, History, pp. 310, 381.

20. Julia Wrigley has shown how the attempt to prevent the division of labor by teaching the new scientific knowledge to artisans actually divided mental from material production, giving greater economic rewards to the intellectual, professional, and managerial classes. Mechanics' institutes were founded in the early nineteenth century for the purpose of training artisans in the sciences that informed the various trades. As the century wore on, however, these institutes focused more narrowly on training artisans only in technical skills. Once the institutes "abandoned the aim of teaching manual workers science," Wrigley writes, educational policy makers "urged that Britain concentrate on teaching managers and foremen scientific principles," "The Division between Mental and Manual Labor: Artisan Education in Nineteenth-Century Britain," in Marxist Inquiries: Studies of Labor, Class, and States, ed. Michael Burawoy and Theda Skocpol, supplement to the American Journal of Sociology 88 (1982):32

21. Sprat, History, p. 113. Writing in 1671 on the virtues of what he calls "Political Arithmetic," William Petty declares his wish to express himself "in terms of number, weight or measure; to use only arguments of sense; and to consider only as causes as have visible foundations in nature, leaving those that depend on the mutable minds, opinion, appetites and passions of particular men to the consideration of others." The Economic Writings of Sir William Petty, 1:244. The theological counterpart to Petty and Sprat was another member of the Royal Society, Sir Joseph Glanville, who attacked the rhetorical excesses of divines in his influential An Essay concerning Preaching: Written for the Direction of A Young Divine (1678). Glanville called for a new style of preaching that "ought to be plain, practical, methodical, affectionate " (11). On the rise of the plain style in the later seventeenth century, see Wilbur Samuel Howell, Logic and Rhetoric in England, 1500-1700 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1956), pp. 364-97.

22. George Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie (Menston: Scholar Press, 1968), pp. 156-57. Howell, commenting on the problem of comparing the poetic and scientific attitudes toward rhetoric, notes that "even if we confined ourselves to a strict comparison between poet and poet or scientist and scientist of the two eras," the contrast would be "striking, and it would still be noticeable" ( Logic and Rhetoric, p. 390). As Howell notes, this historical shift in both domains of writing coincides with a similar change in the attitude toward the rhetorical style of sermons (390-94).

23. In English Literature in History, 1730-80: An Equal, Wide Survey (New York: St. Martins, 1983), pp. 110-76, John Barrell discusses the irony of creating a new standard of English that subjugated "varieties of provincial English, and the modes of expression of different classes, to the norms of the elite." The modern tendency to remove linguistic and cultural matters from the jurisdiction of the state has obscured the equation deliberately drawn by various Enlightenment intellectuals between "the laws of England and the rules of good English, with the aim of revealing that the language community could be structured as a political community" (112).

24. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Vintage, 1973). In Man and the Natural World: A History of the Modern Sensibility (New York: Vintage, 1983), Keith Thomas has shown that in order to reclassify the natural world, Enlightenment theory produced an individual who was both passionate and capable of rationality.

25. John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Peter H. Nidditch (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), III.x.34.

26. As Roy Strong has argued, considerable care was taken with making Elizabeth's birthday, saint's day, and accession day the occasions for carefully orchestrating a ceremonial image of the queen. See his three essays on Elizabeth's pageants in The Cult of Elizabeth: Elizabethan Portraiture and Pageantry (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), pp. 114-91.

27. In 1563 a proclamation was drafted calling for one painter, and one painter only, "to take the natural representation of her majesty," and "to prohibit all manner of other persons to draw, paint, grave, or portray her majesty's personage or visage," Tudor Royal Proclamations: The Later Tudors, 1553-1587, ed. Paul L. Hughes and James F. Larkin (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1969), 2:240. Though we have no evidence how the statute was enforced, we do know it was typical of measures taken to regulate her image. On this point see Roy Strong, Portraits of Queen Elizabeth I (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1963), p. 5.

28. Jonathan Goldberg has discussed the politics of the Jacobean and the Caroline representations of the royal family in James I and the Politics of Literature: Jonson, Shakespeare, Donne, and Their Contemporaries (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983), pp. 85-107. See also Graham Parry, The Golden Age Restor'd: The Culture of the Stuart Court, 1603-42 (New York: St. Martins, 1981), and R. Malcolm Smuts, Court Culture and the Origins of a Royalist Tradition in Early Stuart England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1987).

29. Roy Strong, Van Dyck: Charles I on Horseback (New York: Viking, 1972), p. 70.

30. On Milton's education, see William Riley Parker, Milton: A Biography (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968), 1:13-115; Donald Lemen Clark, John Milton at St. Paul's School: A Study of Ancient Rhetoric in English Renaissance Education (New York, 1948); Harris Francis Fletcher, The Intellectual Development of John Milton, 2 vols. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1956-61).

31. Richard Helgerson has argued that despite modern preconceptions about Milton's hostility to Cavalier culture, in fact he wrote a poetic language that he shared with the collections of poetry published by his royalist contemporaries. Self-Crowned Laureates: Spenser, Jonson, Milton, and the Literary System (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), pp. 185-282. In Poetry and Politics in the English Renaissance (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1984), David Norbrook argues, contrariwise, that the resemblance between the poetry Milton published in 1645 and that of the Cavaliers is at best "superficial" (238).

32. Leah S. Marcus has discussed the manner in which Cavalier poetry participated in the Laudian program so hated by puritans who sought to continue the reformation of the English church. The Politics of Mirth: Jonson, Herrick, Milton, Marvell and the Defense of Old Holiday Pastimes (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986).

33. John Milton, The Reason of Church Government, ed. Ralph A. Haug, in vol. 1 of Complete Prose Works of John Milton, ed. Don M. Wolfe (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1953), p. 237.

34. Typical of such contradictions is the fact that in the antiprelatical pamphlets Milton argued that support for the bishops undermined loyalty to the king. This was first pointed out by Don M. Wolfe, Milton in the Puritan Revolution (New York: Humanities Press, 1963), pp. 46-47.

35. John Milton, Complete Poems and Major Prose, ed. Merritt Y. Hughes (New York: Odyssey Press, 1957).

36. As has often been noted, as early as 1638 Milton announced his intention to write an epic. First in Mansus (lines 78-84) and then two years later in Epitaphium Damonis (lines 160-68), he made clear his desire to write an epic based on Arthurian materials. By 1642, with the publication of The Reason of Church Government, he had reconsidered the form: "what king or knight before the conquest might be chosen in whom to lay the pattern of a Christian hero." Hughes, ed., pp. 668-69. The Trinity manuscript (?1639-42) makes clear that he was also speculating on various biblical and British subjects for tragedies. These sources provide a rather good sense of what kind of poem Milton may have had in mind before the civil war, as well as what he might have drawn from various biblical, classical, and Renaissance models. For the transcript of the jottings on tragedy, see appendix A, "Milton's Outlines for Tragedies," ed. John M. Steadman, in vol. 8 of Complete Prose Works of John Milton, ed. Maurice Kelley (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982), pp. 539-82.

37. Allan H. Gilbert considers Milton's focus to be such a deviation from that of his predecessors. On the Composition of Paradise Lost: A Study of the Ordering and Insertion of Material (New York: Octagon Books, 1972). Although a number of Milton scholars have rightly noted Milton's unusual emphasis on domestic relations, none that we know of has suggested the degree to which this focus was itself revolutionary, except perhaps Harold E. Toliver, "Milton's Household Epic," Milton Studies 9 (1976): 105-20.

38. William Kerrigan and Gordon Braden, in The Idea of the Renaissance (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), pp. 191-218, offer an account of Milton's use of Petrarch in the early poetry and in Paradise Lost .

39. For a discussion of the ideology of this form, see Leonard Tennenhouse, "Sir Walter Ralegh and the Literature of Clientage," in Patronage in the Renaissance, ed. Guy Fitch Lytle and Stephen Orgel (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981), pp. 235-58, and Power on Display: The Politics of Shakespeare's Genres (New York: Methuen, 1986), pp. 30-36.

40. Arthur F. Marotti, "'Love is Not Love': Elizabethan Sonnet Sequences and the Social Order," ELH 49 (1982): 396-428, discusses how envy and desire provided the language for place and advancement in such poetry.

41. It is particularly appropriate that this language follows what Barbara Keifer Lewalski has described as Milton's parodies of "a major topos of the romance mode—the hero's adventure in a Garden of Love." Paradise Lost and the Rhetoric of Literary Forms (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), pp. 70-71.

42. For a discussion of the kind of writing that went into the making of the aristocratic female body, see Ruth Kelso's treatment of the female courtesy book from the late Middle Ages to the Renaissance, Doctrine for the Lady of the Renaissance (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1956), and Suzanne Hull's descriptive bibliography, Chaste, Silent and Obedient: English Books for Women, 1475-1640 (San Marino: Huntington Library, 1982). For an account of the domestic-economy and conduct books that opposed aristocratic display, see Nancy Armstrong, Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), pp. 59-75.

43. Jacques Donzelot says of the two different economic views, "In [the aristocratic model] wealth was produced to provide for the munificence of states. It was their sumptuary activity, the multiplication and refinement of the needs of the central authority, that was conducive to production. Hence wealth was in the manifest power that permitted levies by the state for the benefit of a minority. With [a protocapitalist economic model] the state was no longer the end of production, but its means: it was the responsibility of the state to govern social relations, in such a manner as to intensify this production to a maximum by restricting consumption." The Policing of Families, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Pantheon, 1979), p. 13.

44. Bakhtin, Rabelais, pp. 253-55.

45. Published in 1667, the same year that Petty drew up his proposals for the plague and that Paradise Lost first appeared, Thomas Willis's Essay on the Brain and Nervous Stock located a physical source within each individual's body for something he calls sensus communis, by which he meant the perception of experience that affected fantasy, imagination, and memory. Among other things, Willis argued, it is this sensus communis that arouses desire by a process of the nervous system for which he coined the word "psycheology." What Willis described might be called the essence of the modern individual, an essence that was both verbally articulated and gendered. Klaus Doerner observes that although Willis revolutionized ideas of the nervous system, "the only disorders Willis took over into his nerve theory almost in toto were hysteria and related complaints, removing them from their venerable site in the uterus, and turning them into 'nervous' diseases." Madmen and the Bourgeoisie: A Social History of Insanity and Psychiatry, trans. Joachim Neugroschel and Jean Steinberg (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981), p. 25.

46. Although she does not address this mid-seventeenth-century revision in the representation of a Platonized heavenly love, Annabel Patterson has discussed how the romance form was revived for Charles I and Henrietta Maria, and was itself revised during the interregnum to work against the royal image. Censorship and Interpretation: The Conditions of Writing and Reading in Early Modern England (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1984), pp. 159-202.

47. The engraving was by William Dolle after the Henry Faithorne portrait. John T. Shawcross, Milton: A Bibliography for the Years 1624-1700 (Binghamton: Medieval and Renaissance Texts, 1984), entry 318.

48. For an account of the commentary, see Ants Oras, Milton's Editors and Commentators from Patrick Hume to Henry John Todd, 1695-1801 (New York: Haskell House, 1964; first published 1929). In the course of the eighteenth century, this commentary grew so extensive that an early-nineteenth-century edition (London, 1804) announced on the title page that it offered "an abridgment of the copia and learned notes," along with a life by the Reverend John Evans.

49. Leslie E. Moore, Beautiful Sublime: The Making of Paradise Lost, 1701-1734 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990), p. 158.

50. Quoted in Moore, Beautiful Sublime, p. 159.

51. From this perspective, Stanley Fish's reading of Paradise Lost in Surprised by Sin: The Reader in Paradise Lost (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971) becomes especially useful. Fish focuses on the struggle between one kind of literacy and another (marked as a lack) that is conducted through the literary text. One can think of the neophyte reader, badgered by a text that was designed to humble him, as reproducing the false leaps to meaning that Adam makes when he is learning to interpret the world.

1. We realize that "public" is itself a problematic term. The term does not simply designate everything that is not private. Rather, as Nancy Fraser reminds us, modern cultures are marked by a formation that Habermas calls "the public sphere": "This arena is conceptually distinct from the state; it is a site for the production and circulation of discourse that can in principle be critical of the state. The public sphere in Habermas's sense is also conceptually distinct from the official-economy; it is not an arena of market relations but rather one of discursive relations, a theater for debating and deliberating rather than for buying and selling." "Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy,'' Social Text 25/26 (1990): 57.

2. In "Censorship and English Literature," in vol. 1 of The Collected Essays of Christopher Hill (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1985), p. 41, Hill writes: "It was criminal folly to extend political discussion beyond the charmed circle of the ruling class. Parliament for its part ordered the Lord Mayor of London not to allow the King's answer to the Nineteen Propositions of 1 June 1642 to be printed."

3. Joseph Frank, The Beginnings of the English Newspaper, 1620-1660 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1961), p. 21.

4. There were of course certain restrictions on the free production and flow of information in print. The early newspapers seldom had long runs, and Parliament made repeated efforts to control them, first in 1643 and again in 1647. Until 1649, however, attempts to censor or otherwise control what could be published had only limited success. For an account of the various attempts at imposing parliamentary censorship in the 1640s, see John Feather, A History of British Publishing (London: Routledge, 1988), pp. 43-49, and Frank, Beginnings, pp. 41-43, 115-17, 174-75, 197-98.

5. See G. K. Fortescue, Catalogue of the Pamphlets, Books, Newspapers and Manuscripts Collected by G. Thomason, 1640-1661, 2 vols. (London: British Museum, 1908).

6. In addition to Hill's "Censorship and English Literature," see also Annabel Patterson, Censorship and Interpretation: The Conditions of Writing and Reading in Early Modern England (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1984), and Lois Potter, Secret Rites and Secret Writing: Royalist Literature, 1641-1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).

7. Raymond Williams, The Long Revolution (New York: Columbia University Press, 1961), p. 161.

8. According to Feather, History of British Publishing, p. 52, at the time of the act at least 59 printers claimed to be entitled to the license to print; by 1666 there were at least 150 individuals who had served apprenticeships as printers.

9. Quoted in James Sutherland, The Restoration Newspaper and Its Development (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), p. 2. This act, unlike earlier practices, justified censorship on secular grounds. See J. Walker, "The Censorship of the Press during the Reign of Charles II," History 25 (1950): 219-38.

10. Quoted in Christopher Hill, "Sir John Berkenhead (1617-79)," in vol. 1 of Collected Essays, p. 102. For an account of Roger L'Estrange's activities as surveyor of the press, see George Kitchin, Sir Roger L'Estrange: A Contribution to the History of the Press in the Seventeenth Century (New York: Augustus M. Kelley, 1971; first published 1913).

11. Quoted in Christopher Hill, "John Milton and Andrew Marvell," in vol. 1 of Collected Essays, p. 166.

12. Hill, "Censorship," p. 51. Sutherland tells of one printer L'Estrange had arrested in 1663, John Twyn, who was found with "some sheets still wet from the press." For attempting to print ''a heretical or seditious" publication, Twyn was sentenced to be hanged, drawn and quartered. Sutherland points out: "It is hard for us today to realise that under the Stuarts any criticism of the government could be, and often was in a court of law, interpreted as an attack on the sovereign: on such occasions no real distinction was made between the king's servants and the king himself" (1-3).

13. In defining the modern middle class as one that consolidated itself and rose to hegemony through intellectual labor, we realize we are not only revising the traditional equation between the modern English ruling class and a European bourgeoisie; we are also going against the prevailing notion of "intellectuals" as a group or even a class opposed to the bourgeoisie or at least to its methods of domination. It is certainly not our purpose to question current meanings of the term as it is used, and interrogated, in the definitive collection of essays entitled Intellectuals: Aesthetics, Politics, Academics, ed. Bruce Robbins (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990). We are working at the other end of a continuum that stretches from the late-seventeenth-century members of the Royal Society, John Locke, and others, to the problematic articulated by the essays in Robbins's anthology—namely, the paradox that in order to have the power to criticize the state one must be empowered by state institutions. As Robbins poignantly puts it in his introduction, "these essays are largely animated ... by a desire to interrogate the received opinion that the 'success' of the left in grounding itself within American educational and cultural institutions since the 1960s must be seen as the 'failure,' betrayal, decline, or demise of the intellectual" (xii).

14. Harold Perkin, The Origins of Modern English Society (London: Routledge Kegan Paul, 1969), pp. 252-70.

15. Zygmunt Bauman, Legislators and Interpreters: On Modernity, Post-Modernity and Intellectuals (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1988), p. 1. Pierre Bourdieu has a similar view of the ambiguous position of intellectuals in "The Corporatism of the Universal: The Role of Intellectuals in the Modern World," Telos no. 81 (1989): 99-110. Raymond Williams dates the use of the term "the intellectual" from the early nineteenth century. "Intellectuals,'' in Keyword: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976), pp. 140-42. In Culture and Society, 1780-1950 (Garden City: Doubleday, 1959), p. 38, Williams states that the term had come into common usage by the 1820s. Lewis Coser, Men of Ideas: A Sociologist's View (New York: Free Press, 1965), identifies the middle of the eighteenth century as the moment of emergence, although nowhere does he document the coining of the term. Finally, Edward Shils finds the notion in use in the Middle Ages. "The Intellectuals and the Powers: Some Perspectives for Comparative Analysis," in On Intellectuals: Theoretical Studies Case Studies, ed. Philip Rieff (Garden City: Doubleday and Co., 1969), pp. 25-48. See also Alvin Gouldner, The Future of Intellectuals and the Rise of the New Class (New York: Seabury Press, 1979).

16. The rest of this chapter discusses this paradox from Gramsci to Eastern European theorists and the Ehrenreichs. Each reproduces the idea of an originary and pure, or true, intellectual whose interests were the same as those identifying the group for which he wrote. Each sees the modern intellectual as a deviation from that original. We note, however, that this duality persists even in attempts at determining who belongs in the category of "intellectuals" and who must be excluded. Precisely the issue of which of the two opposing concepts of the intellectual defines university teachers and scholars, simultaneously unites and divides the essays in Robbins's Intellectuals . On the one hand, Stanley Aronowitz argues in "On Intellectuals" (3-56) that scientists should be included among intellectuals, on the grounds that the work they do is primarily intellectual rather than productive in nature. On the other hand, Barbara Ehrenreich's "The Professional-Managerial Class Revisited" (173-85) insists that intellectuals should not be confused with the professional-managerial class. In her analysis, what kind of work one does is less significant than one's motive for doing it. But although she dissociates the work of intellectuals from that of any other class, she also distrusts the idea that intellectuals belong to a specialized class of their own. She solves the problem semantically, by calling intellectuals a "group" rather than a "class"—a group whose interests cannot be identified with those of any class. In "Defenders of the Faith and the New Class" (101-32), Andrew Ross (correctly, to our minds) accepts the conflict between the class from which one comes and the interests for which one speaks as the very condition of being an intellectual. He sees the intellectual as the object both of the disrespect that popular culture displays toward official (high) culture and of the respect that is the basis of his or her intellectual authority (106).

17. Karl Marx, "The Thesis on Feuerbach," in Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, The German Ideology: Part One and Supplementary Texts, ed. C. J. Arthur (New York: International Publishers, 1985), p. 121.

18. That this observation was central to Gramsci's reading of Marx and Engels and to the thinking that led up to his conceptualization of hegemony has been convincingly demonstrated by Joseph V. Femia in Gramsci's Political Thought: Hegemony, Consciousness, and the Revolutionary Process (Oxford: Clarendon, 1987), pp. 61-164, and John Hoffman, The Gramscian Challenge: Coercion and Consent in Marxist Political Theory (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1984), pp. 19-98. See also Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics, trans. Winston Moore and Paul Cammack (London: Verso, 1985), pp. 47-92.

19. Karl Marx, Capital, trans. Ben Fowkes (New York: Vintage Books, 1977), 1:280.

20. In an illuminating essay entitled "Speculations on Reading Marx: After Reading Derrida," in Post-Structuralism and the Question of History, ed. Derek Attridge, Geoff Bennington, and Robert Young (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), pp. 30-62, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak shows how "money" operates in Marx's writing both as a theoretical term to suppress an ''irreducible heterogeneity" (35) and in the rhetorical position of "the sign of a sign, the possibility of the exchange of signs, not merely language but a foreign language" (32). And once money is seen as an unrecognized supplement in Marx," she continues, "it shows all the marks of writing" (33). It is by a parallel logic that we represent the changing behavior of capital in Capital as a story about intellectual labor.

21. For our notion of magical narratives in general, we are indebted to Fredric Jameson's "Magical Narratives: On the Dialectical Use of Genre Criticism," in The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981), pp. 103-50. For Jameson's discussion of Propp, see especially pp. 119-29.

22. Nancy Hartsock sums up the view of Marx and Engels: "By generalizing its own condition, by making all of society a propertyless producer, the proletariat has the possibility of creating a classless society," Money, Sex and Power: Toward a Feminist Historical Materialism (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1985), p. 135.

23. We find that whenever modern intellectuals theorize historical change, an element of intellectual labor is always crucial. In Anti-Dühring (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1962), Engels, for example, wrote that before the state can "wither away" it must take "possession of the means of production in the name of society " (385, our italics).

24. Antonio Gramsci, "The Formation of the Intellectuals," in Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci, trans. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (New York: International Publishers, 1971), pp. 5-23. The quote is from p. 10.

25. George Konrad and Ivan Szelenyi, The Intellectuals on the Road to Class Power, trans. Andrew Arato and Richard E. Allen (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1979), p. 22.

26. "Fetishism," in An Antonio Gramsci Reader: Selected Writings, 1916-1935, ed. David Forgacs (New York: Schocken, 1988), pp. 243-45.

27. "Utopia," Gramsci Reader, pp. 45-52.

28. Near the beginning of this century, Kautsky and Lenin compared the intellectual to the proletarian on the grounds that both lived by selling their labor and were therefore likely to be exploited under capitalism. Unlike the worker, however, the intellectual does mental work that often places him in a managerial relation to other workers. So he may live in a manner comparable to that of the bourgeoisie. In thus joining the dominant class, they believed, the intellectual turned his labor (which should, under capitalism, resist the state on behalf of working people) to support the interests of that class. At the same time, Kautsky and Lenin also believed that the intellectual's identity was not completely determined by the dominant class. Indeed, rather than serve the interests of the bourgeoisie, the intellectual had other options. He could criticize the operations of capitalism, or he could support the working-class struggle directly. As George Konrad and Ivan Szelenyi have more recently insisted, however, "both solutions have in common the assumption that the intellectual is capable of rising above his historical determinedness"; if intellectuals tend to behave like the dominant class, it is not out of choice, it is simply in the nature of what they do. This summary is based on Konrad and Szelenyi, Intellectuals on the Road to Class Power (the quotation is from p. 13), and Alvin W. Gouldner, Against Fragmentation: The Origins of Marxism and Sociology (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 14-22.

29. Barbara and John Ehrenreich, "The Professional-Managerial Class," in Between Labor and Capital, ed. Pat Walker (Boston: South End Press, 1979), pp. 5-45.

30. It is important to mention Barbara Ehrenreich's more recent qualification of this thesis in "The Professional-Managerial Class Revisited," in Intellectuals, ed. Robbins: "The PMC contains many people who are not intellectuals in any sense of the word, and conversely people who ought to be regarded as 'intellectuals' are scattered throughout all social classes" (174). Once having defined intellectuals in terms of the service they perform, first as an outcropping and then as a self-perpetuating displacement of the traditional bourgeoisie, she then retrieves the more traditional definition of intellectual in a way that totally confounds the precision of her first model. She does so, we believe, in response to criticism that rules out the possibility that critical intellectual resistance to the dominant culture is one of the specialized functions of that class.

31. At this point, we must stress the sometimes neglected point that hegemony is not just domination but a relationship. A group acquires hegemony when its viewpoint and its ideas become the viewpoint and the ideas with which all others have to negotiate in order to present their own views, so that any opposition in fact attests to the dominance of the elite group's views. For this reason, change often comes from conservative quarters. When, more recently, Laclau and Mouffe try to imagine a similar transformation, they, too, understand that it is not enough to identify the appearance of such transformations full-blown in speech and writing. One has to understand the process of cultural negotiations, minor changes, and displacements through which a new group acquired both authority and its distinctive form. "In order to speak of hegemony, the articulatory moment is not sufficient. It is also necessary that the articulation should take place through a confrontation with antagonistic articulatory practices." Laclau and Mouffe, Hegemony, p. 135. A specific articulation, in other words, is the end product of a complicated political and historical struggle that excludes and represses some information in order to make statements that have the authority to seem meaningful and right.

32. Rudolf Bahro, The Alternative in Eastern Europe, trans. David Fernbach (Manchester: NLB, 1978). We are indebted to Christopher Hitchens for calling this book to our attention.

33. This problem does not arise only within the official bureaucracies of factories and the statehouse. Bahro's principle of bureaucratic rivalry can be expanded to include those intellectuals who represent themselves to the public (and to one another) as occupying a position outside and in opposition to the economic and political spheres. A special issue of Cultural Critique (vol. 12, Spring 1989) devoted to "Discursive Strategies and the Economy of Prestige" demonstrates how Bahro's thesis can be extended into the humanities. The editors, Richard Leppert and Bruce Lincoln, argue that the notion of an "economy" based on the exchange, accumulation, and investment of "labor, material goods, and currency" can be used to describe "comparable (but hardly identical) processes ... in what we would term an economy of prestige, inspired in a loose way by Pierre Bourdieu's call 'to extend economic calculation to all the goods, material and symbolic, without distinction, that present themselves as rare and worthy of being sought after in a particular formation'" (7). Although they draw on Bourdieu's concept of a larger economy in which virtually any symbolic object may participate, Leppert and Lincoln distinguish ''the components of an economy of prestige" from an economy per se, on the basis that prestige results from a process "through which members of society formulate, share, and reformulate their opinions" (7). The prestige system can be said to resemble bureaucratic rivalry because not only is it an extension of the economy (in the restricted sense of the term), it also detaches itself from the economy by certain "acts of discourse" (resembling the bureaucratic hierarchy created by the gathering, hoarding, and selective distribution of information). Leppert and Lincoln stress that the prestige system is not identical with the economy but analogous to it, and therefore potentially in conflict with economic value. Three other essays in this collection focus on the operations of prestige in modern European culture: Susan McClary, "Terminal Prestige: The Case of Avant-Garde Music Composition," pp. 57-81; Jochen Schulte-Sasse, "The Prestige of the Artist under Conditions of Modernity," pp. 83-100; and John Barrell, "'The Dangerous Goddess': Masculinity, Prestige, and the Aesthetic in Early Eighteenth-Century Britain," pp. 101-31. All three describe a process that began in the eighteenth century and, with increasing consistency, reinflected the value of high-culture objects back onto the personality of their makers, so that the artist rather than the artifact he produced became the source of that object's value.

1. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983).

2. David Cressy, Coming Over: Migration and Communication between England and New England in the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987); Ian K. Steele, The English Atlantic, 1675-1740 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986); Jacob M. Price, "The Transatlantic Economy," in Colonial British America: Essays in the New History of the Early Modern Era, ed. Jack P. Greene and J. R. Pole (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984), pp. 18-42; David D. Hall, "Religion and Society: Problems and Reconsiderations," in Colonial British America, pp. 317-44; Norman Fiering, "The Transatlantic Republic of Letters: A Note on the Circulation of Learned Periodicals to Early Eighteenth-Century America," William and Mary Quarterly 33 (1976): 642-60.

3. In The Long Revolution (New York: Columbia University Press, 1961), Raymond Williams explains how in England a new group of people acquired the means of producing ruling ideas, but he does not seriously entertain the possibility that such a cultural revolution first defined that class of people as such or provided the means for its domination.

4. Foucault begins Discipline and Punish, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage, 1979), with the dismemberment of Damien, only to shift his focus abruptly to the kind of state power that operates on the mind rather than the body—through a monopoly on truth rather than violence—to produce an internally regulated subject.

5. Since the business of education expresses "the wider organization of a culture and a society," "what is thought of as 'an education'" will always be, according to Williams, "a particular selection, a particular set of emphases and omissions" (125). He demonstrates this principle in describing the growth of a particular kind of literacy and the development of various educational institutions that were tailored to produce a population for an industrializing England (125-213). E. P. Thompson shows in great detail how it took a whole century or more before local forms of labor would be rendered obsolete and a working class produced that could man the factories of nineteenth-century England. The Making of the English Working Class (New York: Vintage, 1966). Both Thompson and Williams emphasize the degree to which intellectuals not only classified people but made them fit the intellectuals' categories.

6. Warner's argument effectively challenges Whig interpretations of the spread of print (that technology precedes epistemology) by illustrating how well Anderson's model of print capitalism works in eighteenth-century America. The Letters of the Republic: Publication and the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-Century America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990).

7. See the discussion of Hill and Stone in chapter 5.

8. L'Estrange seems to have desired constraints on printing more rigid and onerous than had ever been in place before. His proposals would have severely restricted the size of the Stationers' Company and empowered his own office well beyond overseeing the printing of newsbooks and newspapers; the proposals would have granted him an indirect hand in the licensing of coffeehouse keepers. By these proposals he sought to create a patronage system—today we might call it a system of bribery and extortion—that would probably have equaled the worst excesses of the patronage system under James I. See Kitchin, Sir Roger L'Estrange, pp. 95-189.

9. Foucault has discussed this at length in The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. A. M. Sheriden Smith (New York: Pantheon, 1972).

10. Benedict Anderson provides a good example of this process when he describes how North American nationalism began to define its own historical trajectory in relation to England. The Protestant, English-speaking creoles of New England were more tightly bunched in New England and more "tightly linked by print as well as commerce" than were, for example, the Spanish creoles in Central America (64).

11. Cornelis Disco points out that "revisionist" Marxist critiques of socialism elaborate earlier attacks and predictions that "in spite of the common attack on the orthodox Marxist scenario of the triumph of socialism and the transition to communism, [they have] ... lifted the lid from a certain Marxist nightmare: namely, that the idea of a future "classless society" might turn out to be as mythical as the present idea of "workers' parties.'' "Intellectuals in Advanced Capitalism: Capital, Closure, and the New Class Thesis," in Intellectuals, Universities and the State in Western Modern Societies, ed. Ron Eyerman, Lennart Svensson, and Thomas Söderquist (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), pp. 74-75. With regard to the Ehrenreichs' thesis, Disco writes: "The PMC thesis attempts to have the Marxist cake and eat it too by providing a class account of the new professional and managerial strata which leaves the original Marxist class scenario intact. The PMC is regarded as a new class specific to the monopoly stage of capitalism, whose specific place in the division of labor (read: specific function ) is the reproduction of capitalist culture and capitalist class relations. The PMC is thus the most recent incarnation of the mysterious and interstitial 'petty bourgeoisie,' destined to disappear from the historical stage whenever the essential class contradiction between global capital and global labor reasserts itself" (75-76).

12. There are a number of indications that certain forms of social reproduction precede what are believed to be the corresponding means of social production. In "The Moral Economy of the English Crowd," Past and Present 50 (1971): 76-136, E. P. Thompson shows how late in the eighteenth century it was before anything resembling a modern middle class could be discerned; social contention took place between landlords and crowds, not between those who owned labor and those who owned money. In The Machinery Question and the Making of Political Economy, 1815-1848 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), Maxine Berg contends that entrepreneurs associated with mechanization were a despised minority until the great landowners lost their ability to compensate for food shortages and settle local disputes. Fear of the mob, apparently inspired by the French Revolution, created a brief and uncomfortable alliance between the old aristocracy and the owners of machinery. E. P. Thompson's account of the radical press in Making of the English Working Class, pp. 713-36 and passim, argues that it was necessary to suppress the radical press because it played a major role in resisting the conversion of older forms of skilled or artisan labor into a "working class." In The Industrial Muse: A Study of Nineteenth-Century Working-Class Novels (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1974), Martha Vicinus has shown how broadsides and other products of the popular press expressed hostility to the mechanization of labor as well as to bourgeois sexuality. These publications gave way to what might be called a working-class literature, which emulated the high cultural modes of poetry and fiction. Vicinus suggests that the working class acquired access to the legitimate press in a way that ultimately helped to subordinate their culture to that of the new middle class.

13. It is curious that Anderson does not give novels an instrumental role in the formation of New World nationalism, even though they produce "a precise analogue of the idea of the nation" (31). Doris Sommer has gone a long way toward making this connection. Her ground-breaking study, Foundational Fictions: When History Was Romance in Latin America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), shows how nineteenth-century Latin American novels helped to form the nation-states of Central and South America. We would like to thank her for allowing us to read portions of this book in manuscript.

14. Olivia Smith, The Politics of Language, 1791-1819 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1986), p. 3.

15. Until the early eighteenth century, literacy was assumed by most readers to be male. From about the middle of the eighteenth century on, literacy was assumed to include women, but women readers were thought to have different thoughts and feelings from men. This difference can be seen in the appearance of gendered consciousness in fiction and other popular writing, and in the use of gendered pronouns in reference to readers. For a discussion of this point, see Nancy Armstrong, Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), pp. 96-160.

16. Lynn Hunt has described this group as "fourth generation Annales historians." Introduction to The New Cultural History, ed. Lynn Hunt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), pp. 6-7.

17. Philippe Ariès, introduction to A History of Private Life, vol. 3, Passions of the Renaissance, ed. Roger Chartier, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989), p. 1.

18. Norbert Elias, The History of Manners, trans. Edmund Jephcott (New York: Pantheon, 1978), Power and Civility, trans. Edmund Jephcott (New York: Pantheon, 1982), The Court Society, trans. Edmund Jephcott (New York: Pantheon, 1983); Roger Chartier, "Figures of Modernity," in History of Private Life, 3:17.

19. Yves Castan, "Politics and Private Life," in History of Private Life, 3:43.

20. Jacques Gélis, "The Child: From Anonymity to Individuality," in History of Private Life, 3:309-25. The quote is found on p. 310.

21. Jacques Revel, "The Uses of Civility," in History of Private Life, 3:167-205. See especially pp. 188-89.

22. Jean-Louis Flandrin, "Distinction through Taste," in History of Private Life, 3:265-307. See also George Vigarello, Concepts of Cleanliness: Changing Attitudes in France since the Middle Ages, trans. Jean Birrell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988); Norbert Elias, History of Manners, pp. 129-68; Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (London: Methuen, 1986), pp. 125-48.

23. Roger Chartier argues that the growth of silent reading and private writing helped to create "a new private sphere into which the individual could retreat." "The Practical Impact of Writing," in History of Private Life, 3:125. Orest Ranum in "The Refuges of Intimacy," pp. 207-63, argues that certain spaces within early modern culture appear to have been reserved for privacy in the modern, or individualistic, sense. The souvenir space and the souvenir book, for example, "were quite private, having been possessed by an individual unique in space and time. Nevertheless,'' claims Ranum, "the significance of such spaces and objects was encoded and perfectly comprehensible to others. The source of the meaning was social" (210, our italics). In "The Literature of Intimacy," pp. 327-61, Madeleine Foisil makes the same distinction. She says of memoir writers that "to our way of thinking, these seventeenth-century authors lacked awareness of the inner self" (329), and of journal writers that, although "children were loved ... there was no sentiment about childhood" (346). About the same body of writing, Jean Marie Goulement in "Literary Practices: Publicizing the Private," 363-95, insists: "The genre is an aristocratic one; the individual is reduced in it to his public acts" (381). Given this analysis of genres that are usually regarded either as anticipating the self-enclosed consciousness of modern authors or else as indicating the presence of such consciousness in the past, Goulement is at a loss to say why "by the late 17th and early 18th centuries, all literature was influenced by a similar affirmation of private life" (385).

24. Jacques Donzelot, The Policing of Families, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Pantheon, 1979).

25. Donzelot writes, "To understand the strategic significance of this movement of normalization of the adult-child relationship, we have to recognize that the object of these measures was hygienic and political in nature, the two facets being indissoluble. Doubtless they were aimed at remedying the state of abandonment in which the children of the laboring classes were apt to find themselves, but just as important if not more so, they also sought to reduce the socio-political capacity of these strata by breaking the initiatory ties that existed between children and parents ... that resulted from the loosening of ancient communal constraints" (78-79).

26. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Pantheon, 1978), p. 17.

27. Except with respect to the elite, whose breeding had always been highly codified, the focus on sexual reproduction was a new phenomenon. Peter Wagner discusses the enormous outpouring of erotic literature during this period in Eros Revived: Erotica of the Enlightenment in England and America (London: Secker and Warburg, 1988). Frank Mort describes a corresponding growth in the medical practices attending to sexual reproduction, in Dangerous Sexualities: Medico-Moral Politics in England since 1830 (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1987).

For an account of the moment when childbirth became medicalized, see Robert A. Erickson, "'The Books of Generation': Some Observations on the Style of the British Midwife Books, 1671-1764," in Sexuality in Eighteenth-Century Britain, ed. Paul-Gabriel Boucé (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1982), pp. 74-94, and his Mother Midnight: Birth, Sex, and Fate in Eighteenth-Century Fiction (Defoe, Richardson, and Sterne ) (New York: AMS Press, 1986). Finally, Henry Abelove's "Some Speculations on the History of Sexual Intercourse during the Long Eighteenth Century in England," Genders 6 (1989): 125-30, shows how permissible sexual pleasure came to be equated with the reproductive act.

28. Anita Levy, Other Women: The Writing of Race, Class, and Gender (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990).

29. See Armstrong, Desire and Domestic Fiction, pp. 59-95.

30. Frederick Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State (New York: International Publishers, 1942). For Engels, polygamy and free love offer ways of imagining an alternative political order.

31. Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy: An Essay in Political and Social Criticism, ed. J. Dover Wilson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1960). See the chapter entitled "Doing as One Likes," pp. 72-97.

32. Quoted in Lawrence Stone and Jeanne C. Fawtier Stone, An Open Elite? England, 1540-1880 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1984), pp. 410-11.

1. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983), p. 62.

2. For a brief overview of the various ways in which written information circulated in British America from the last half of the seventeenth century through the first half of the eighteenth, see Richard D. Brown, Knowledge Is Power: The Diffusion of Information in Early America, 1700-1865 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), pp. 16-64. However, Brown has very little to say in this book about the circulation of fictional materials.

3. William Whately, A Bridebush or a Direction for Married Persons (London, 1619), p. 89.

4. The Political Works of James I, ed. Charles H. McIlwain (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1918), p. 305. For a discussion of this version of the Jacobean and Caroline theory of patriarchalism, see Gordon H. Schochet, Patriarchalism in Political Thought: The Authoritarian Family and Political Speculation and Attitudes Especially in Seventeenth Century England (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1975).

5. Edward Topsell, The Householder: or Perfect Man (London, 1610), ^* 5v.

6. William Gouge, Of Domesticall Duties, 3d ed. (London, 1634), p. 17.

7. William Gouge, for example, is particularly careful to praise the monarch. One of his marriage treatises explains, "God gaue vs such a King as we now haue, of the stronger sexe ... furnished with such knowledge and zeale, as neuer King since Christ had." An Exposition of Part of the Fift and Sixt Chapters of S. Paules Epistle to the Ephesians, wherein is handled all of the duties as belong to Household Gouernment (London, 1630), p. 3.

8. Quoted in Mary Shanley, "Marriage Contract and Social Contract in Seventeenth-Century English Political Thought," in The Family in Political Thought, ed. Jean Bethke Elshtain (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1982), pp. 80-95. The quoted material is from p. 86.

9. The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce, ed. Lowell W. Coolidge, in vol. 2 of Complete Prose Works of John Milton, ed. Ernest Sirluck (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1959), p. 229. The year before (1642), in a very popular tract, Henry Parker had used much the same language when he wrote, "They which contract to obey to their own ruin, or having so contracted, they which esteem such a contract before their own preservation are felonious to themselves." "Observations Upon Some of his Majesties Late Answers and Expresses," in Revolutionary Prose of the English Civil War, ed. Howard Erskine-Hill and Graham Storey (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), p. 41.

10. By that time, Ernest Sirluck has noted, Milton had "completely integrated the case for divorce with that for Parliament's supremacy." Complete Prose Works, 2:157.

11. Tetrachordon, ed. Arnold Williams, in vol. 2 of Complete Prose Works of John Milton, pp. 571-718. The quote is found on p. 612.

12. Milton identifies the sign of a true marriage with the formation of a "whole man" and a domestic unit. See, for example, Tetrachordon, in Complete Prose Works, 2:601-13.

13. Patriarcha and Other Political Works of Sir Robert Filmer, ed. Peter Laslett (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1949), p. 283.

14. John Locke, Two Treatises of Government, ed. Peter Laslett (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), II.1.1-14.

15. There is a long-running debate among political philosophers concerning Locke's response to Filmer's arguments: Did he come down on the side of the elites who possessed property or on the side of labor and the natural rights of ordinary man? See, for example, C. B. Macpherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962). For a critique of Macpherson, see Peter Laslett, "Market Society and Political Theory," Historical Journal 6 (1964), 150-54; James Tully, A Discourse on Property: John Locke and His Adversaries (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980); Alan Ryan, Property and Political Theory (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1984), 14-48. For a brief review of Macpherson's historical claims, see Richard Ashcraft, Revolutionary Politics and Locke's Two Treatises of Government (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986), pp. 150-60; Andrej Rapaczynski, Nature and Politics: Liberalism in the Philosophies of Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987), pp. 177-90. We do not claim to be determining anything about Locke's theory of property beyond the rhetorical strategies that enable its arguments to appear logical. In opposing Filmer's representation of the English social body as the monarch's body, Locke imagines the social body as a genetic, or self-replicating, cellular structure.

16. On this point, see Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1974), p. 174, and James Tully, Discourse on Property, pp. 116-18.

17. We wish to thank Kathryn Milun for sharing her research on the terra nullius trope, as set forth in her manuscript "Pathologies of Modern Space."

18. Neal Wood writes that Locke refers to a so-called "waste land" to make the distinction between land that has a public status as opposed to land owned by parish and country or "commons." John Locke and Agrarian Capitalism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), pp. 61-62.

19. Typical of Locke's use of masculine pronouns is this example: "If such a state of Reason, such an Age of Discretion made him free, the same shall make his Son free too" (II.59.11-12).

20. Locke, of course, enjoyed some of the fruits of traditional clientage. But none of the offices he was given through the influence of Lord Ashley—later the Earl of Shaftesbury—were particularly lucrative or politically powerful. The older model of clientage and patronage had quite simply passed away. In the introduction to his edition of the Two Treatises, Peter Laslett states in a note: "Locke was so conscious of status, his own in particular, that he actually cancelled the title-page of one of his books because it described him as Esq., and substituted another calling him Gent" (42). Laslett goes on to ask, "Can [Locke] be called, as so often he is, the spokesman of a rising class, the middle class, the capitalists, the bourgeoisie?" and offers this response: "He is perhaps best described as an independent, free-moving intellectual, aware as others were not of the direction of social change'' (43-44).

21. However, Locke's model household was still imagined only for a privileged minority in England. It was unlikely, for example, that either the poor family or the working family could provide the kind of household Locke considered suitable for his political model. According to Peter Laslett, Locke thought that the poor existed because of "a relaxation of discipline and the corruption of manners" and that a working family "had no right to expect its children to be at leisure after the age of three" (43).

22. As we noted in chapter 1, both Fredric Jameson and Terry Eagleton respond to a discrepancy between the individuated perspective produced by Paradise Lost and the lack of such individuals in the culture for which the poem was written. They consider the discrepancy itself as the historical marker of the poem. See Fredric Jameson, "Religion and Ideology," 1642: Literature and Power in the Seventeenth Century, ed. Francis Barker, Jay Bernstein, John Coombes, Peter Hulme, Jennifer Stone, and Jon Stratton (Colchester: University of Essex, 1981), pp. 315-36, and Terry Eagleton, "The God That Failed," in Re-Membering Milton: Essays on the Texts and Traditions, ed. Mary Nyquist and Margaret W. Ferguson (New York: Methuen, 1987), pp. 342-47.

23. Feror example, Alan Macfarlane, The Family Life of Ralph Josselin, A Seventeenth-Century Clergyman: An Essay in Historical Anthropology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), pp. 105-25, sees Josselin's diary as showing that parental feeling and affective bonds have remained unchanged since at least the early modern period. A similar view of Josselin's diary is maintained by Linda A. Pollock, Forgotten Children: Parent-Child Relations from 1500-1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), pp. 136-37; Ralph A. Houlbrooke, The English Family, 1450-1700 (London: Longman, 1984), pp. 136-37; and Michael MacDonald, Mystical Bedlam: Madness, Anxiety, and Healing in Seventeenth-Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), p.

84. But the diary is also seen as supporting quite a contrary view of the family: Lawrence Stone, The Family, Sex and Marriage in England, 1500-1800 (New York: Harper and Row, 1977), p. 214; Randolph Trumbach, The Rise of the Egalitarian Family: Aristocratic Kinship and Domestic Relations in Eighteenth-Century England (New York: Academic Press, 1978), pp. 288-89; Edward Shorter, The Making of the Modern Family (New York: Basic Books, 1984), p. 64. See also Stephanie Coontz, The Social Origins of Private Life (London: Verso, 1988), p. 29.

24. The Diary of Ralph Josselin, 1616-1683, ed. Alan Macfarlane (London: published for the British Academy by Oxford University Press, 1976).

25. In "L'Histoire sociale des rêves," Annales 28 (1973): 329-42, Peter Burke identifies some of the material in the dreams recorded by Archbishop Laud, Elias Ashmole, Ralph Josselin, and Samuel Sewell that makes them all unmistakably seventeenth-century dreams.

26. Henry Neville, The Isle of Pines Or a Late discovery of a fourth Island in Terra Australis Incognita (London, 1668). Neville is better known for another kind of political tract. Like Harrington's Oceana, Neville's Plato Redivivus sought to explain what had gone wrong with the old relationship between property and monarchy, leading to the collapse of the latter. In these tracts, the transmission of property ideally followed exact inheritance rules, alleviating the conflict between hereditary rights (represented by the Lords) and property rights (represented by the Commons) that had destabilized monarchy. According to J. G. A. Pocock's introduction to The Political Works of James Harrington (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), pp. 60-64, Neville's use of the family to argue for strict inheritance rules was precisely what Edmund Burke would later find interesting in republican writing. We, however, see an implicit contradiction between the geneticism organizing the irreverent Isle of Pines and the genealogy organizing aristocratic historiography—the difference between replicating the individual and extending the aristocratic body.

27. Neville, Isle of Pines, title page. For an account of the enormous popularity of this text in England, France, Germany, Italy, and America, see the introductory essay by Worthington Chauncey Ford, ed., The Isle of Pines, 1668: An Essay in Bibliography (Boston: Merrymount Press, 1920).

28. A. Owen Aldridge has discussed the importance of this element in "Polygamy in Early Fiction: Henry Neville and Denis Veiras," PMLA 65 (1950): 464-72.

29. From the fourteenth through the end of the sixteenth century, statutes were periodically enacted and royal proclamations issued that were designed to regulate dress. These laws were supposed to make rank visible. Cloth of gold, for example, could only be worn by members of the royal family, velvet by the aristocracy; silk was permitted to the gentry but not to people of low birth; and so forth. The regulations covered cuts, the use of special fabrics and furs, dyes of a particular hue, and thread and trim. The regulation of these features of dress distinguished between members of the royal family, dukes, marquesses, earls, viscounts, barons, and knights, between servingmen, yeomen, and husbandmen, and even between wage earners having incomes of 200, 100, 40, 20, 5, and 2 pounds per annum. Despite the obvious difficulties in enforcing these laws, nineteen such proclamations were issued during the latter half of the sixteenth century.

The proclamations were posted throughout the land to ensure that everyone ranked himself or herself in these terms and interpreted the rank and income of other people accordingly. And even though this legislation was vacated in 1604, there were at least a half a dozen attempts in the first two decades of the seventeenth century to introduce new sumptuary regulations. For an account of this legislation and its impact, see N. B. Harte, "State Control of Dress and Social Change in Pre-Industrial England," in Trade, Government and Economy in PreIndustrial England: Essays Presented to F. J. Fisher, ed. D. C. Coleman and A. H. John (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1976), pp. 132-65.

30. Michael McKeon contends that the genealogy originating in the otherwise unnoteworthy bookkeeper is not grounded in the aristocratic kinship practices it may seem at first to parody. The Origins of the English Novel, 1600-1740 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), pp. 251-52.

31. In carrying on a direct conversation between himself and God, Josselin's diary is characteristic of the diaries kept by many devout men and women. For an account of the practice and kinds of diary keeping in England during this period, see Élisabeth Bourcier, Les Journaux privés en Angleterre de 1600 à 1660 (Paris: Publications de Sorbonne, 1976). For an overview of diaries kept by women, see Sara Heller Mendleson, "Stuart Women's Diaries and Occasional Memoirs," Women in English Society, 1500-1800, ed. Mary Prior (London: Methuen, 1985), pp. 181-210.

32. William Haller has explained how diaries kept by puritan saints provided at times biographical information that was appended to the sermons read at their funerals; some kind of personal testimony to one's spiritual struggles was expected to be part of such services. "Always and everywhere in Puritan circles oral tradition extensively supplemented the written hagiography. If the saint had kept no diary, he had at any rate unbosomed himself to his friends." The Rise of Puritanism; or, The Way to the New Jerusalem as Set Forth in Pulpit and Press from Thomas Cartwright to John Lilburne and John Milton, 1570-1643 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1938), pp. 101-2. Though a diary might supply this kind of information, there is no indication that Josselin's diary was written with such a public ceremony in mind.

33. Diary keeping was regularly thought of as a means of tallying up one's gifts from God. Rise of Puritanism , pp. 38-39, 96-99. Owen C. Watkins has discussed this feature with regard to other puritan diarists in The Puritan Experience: Studies in Spiritual Autobiography (New York: Schocken, 1972), pp. 18-25. See also George A. Starr, Defoe and Spiritual Autobiography (New York: Gordian Press, 1965), pp. 6-7, 28-31; J. Paul Hunter, The Reluctant Pilgrim: Defoe's Emblematic Method and Quest for Form in Robinson Crusoe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1966), pp. 72-73, 82-86.

34. On this point, see Felicity A. Nussbaum, The Autobiographical Subject: Gender and Ideology in Eighteenth-Century England (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989).

35. The framework of a single chapter will not allow us to explain why Hobbes has been excluded from our account of the discursive take-off that allowed words to produce a whole new set of origins both for themselves and for the English "people." But we can suggest (both here and in our later discussion of Defoe) how we would deal with this question. We would begin with the question that perplexed C. B. Macpherson: How can one "reconcile Hobbes's acceptance of bourgeois morality, and his prescription of a state designed to protect and facilitate a life of competition, with the contemporary bourgeois dislike or neglect of Hobbes's doctrine?" Introduction to Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. C. B. Macpherson (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985), p. 53. We would not attempt to answer the question—as Macpherson does, unsuccessfully—by identifying features in Hobbes's political theory that might have set that theory at odds with the ideology of democracy. Such an argument would not explain a thing if, as we argue, the logic that propelled the writing that emerged in the wake of the English Revolution was inherently conservative. In part 1 of Leviathan, Hobbes puts forward a creationist definition of human nature; in doing so, he reveals his affiliation with the cultural moment that was passing away rather than with one that was emerging. According to Hobbes's epistemology, the mind neither constitutes a territory unto itself nor acquires knowledge in the same way that men acquire property. He lacks a semiotic, then, that would account for the production of interior (personal) and exterior (political) discursive worlds.

36. John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Peter H. Nidditch (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), II.i.2.

37. "Children, when they first come into it, are surrounded with a world of new things, which, by a constant solicitation of their senses, draw the mind constantly to them, forward to take notice of new, and apt to be delighted with the variety of changing Objects ... and so growing up in a constant attention to outward Sensations, seldom make any considerable Reflection on what passes within them, till they come to be of riper Years; and some scarce ever at all" (II.i.8).

38. Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe, ed. Michael Shinagel (New York: W. W. Norton, 1975), p. 6.

39. In Prodigals and Pilgrims: The American Revolution against Patriarchal Authority, 1750-1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), p. 69, Jay Fliegelman writes: "The same 'inclination' that in 1697 Locke had identified with passion and insisted must be suppressed is identified with providence in Defoe's novel." See also Starr, Defoe and Spiritual Autobiography, pp. 74-81.

40. Literary critics tend either to see Robinson Crusoe as a working out of some model of spiritual autobiography or to focus on Crusoe's acquisition of private property. Starr, Defoe and Spiritual Autobiography, and Hunter, Reluctant Pilgrim, have been particularly useful in directing our attention to the puritan writing upon which Defoe drew. The classic description of Crusoe's economic individualism is in Ian Watt's The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding (London: Chatto and Windus, 1957), pp. 60-92. For readings that seek to reconcile the two opposing trends in Crusoe criticism, see, for example, McKeon, Origins of the English Novel, pp. 315-37; John Richetti, Defoe's Narratives: Situations and Structures (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), pp. 21-63, and Richetti's Popular Fiction before Richardson: Narrative Patterns, 1700-1739 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969), pp. 13-18, 92-96.

41. Homer O. Brown's "The Displaced Self in the Novels of Daniel Defoe," ELH 38 (1971): 562-90, is particularly useful in calling attention to the contradictions in the novel that arise out of fear.

42. Michael McKeon describes this episode as "the beginning of the movement of narrative 'atonement,' when Character and Narrator come together." Origins of the English Novel, p. 318. We agree with McKeon and others that this is a turning point in the novel, but we would like to rephrase the reason why it is so. When critics focus on events at the level of consciousness, there is a tendency to overlook the degree to which intellectual labor is responsible for displacing and subordinating manual labor.

43. In God's Plot and Man's Stories: Studies in the Fictional Imagination from Milton to Fielding (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), Leopold Damrosch, Jr., notes that " Crusoe reflects the progressive desacralizing of the world that was implicit in Protestantism and that ... ended by disenchanting it altogether" (192). This Weberian concept of Protestantism as progressive secularization overlooks the fact that mystification does not depart with the desacralization of the universe. Indeed, Robinson Crusoe demonstrates how the magical qualities once attributed to God are transferred onto the "self" as God becomes part of personal life in the form of useful knowledge in the service of the individual.

44. Keith Thomas, Man and the Natural World: A History of the Modern Sensibility (New York: Pantheon Books, 1983), pp. 121-40, identifies this question as the inevitable consequence of challenging the Christian notion of soul, which had ensured man's essential difference from animals and set him above them. With that challenge came the problem of how to preserve the difference between human nature and bestial nature. The problem was resolved by stressing the difference between reason and sensation rather than their continuity and reason's dependency on sensations.

45. For an important discussion of how Defoe's narrative "delineates the subjective order—the structure of feeling" of a disciplinary institution such as the penitentiary, see John Bender, Imagining the Penitentiary: Fiction and the Architecture of Mind in Eighteenth-Century England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), pp. 43-83.

46. Karl Marx, Capital, trans. Ben Fowkes (New York: Vintage Books, 1977), 1:288-300. See our discussion in chapter 5.

47. Reprinted in Defoe: The Critical Heritage, ed. Pat Rogers (London and Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1972), p. 53.

48. Marx, Capital, pp. 168-73.

49. Maximillian E. Novak, in both "Crusoe the King and the Political Evolution of His Island," SEL 2 (1962): 337-50, and Economics and the Fiction of Daniel Defoe (Berkeley: University of California, 1962), has suggested that Robinson Crusoe should be read in terms of a theory of property. Although it may start out in that way, in our estimation Crusoe is not so resolved. If, as Novak has suggested, democracy does offer a solution to the problem posed by this novel, then we are forced to rethink the conventional notion of democracy, bringing it much more into line with Foucault's notion of discipline than mainstream literary criticism or historians are generally willing to do. Other critics—such as G. A. Starr and J. Paul Hunter—have argued that the novel is about the spiritual rather than the economic. This seems to us a matter of emphasis. Property in Crusoe is precisely the sort of issue that distinguishes this text from more "orthodox" spiritual autobiographies.

50. See Charles F. Bahmueller, The National Charity Company: Jeremy Bentham's Silent Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981), pp. 58-75.

51. Jean Baudrillard, "Simulacra and Simulations," in Selected Writings, ed. Mark Poster (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988), pp. 166-84.

52. On this point, see Leonard Tennenhouse, "Simulating History: A Cockfight for Our Times," The Drama Review 34 (1990): 137-50.

1. See, for example, David Cressy, Coming Over: Migration and Communication between England and New England in the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), and his Literacy and the Social Order: Reading and Writing in Tudor and Stuart England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980); Ian K. Steele, The English Atlantic, 1675-1740: An Exploration of Communication and Community (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986); David D. Hall, World of Wonder, Days of Judgment: Popular Religious Belief in Early New England (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990); Michael Warner, The Letters of the Republic: Publication and the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-Century America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990); and Richard D. Brown, Knowledge Is Power: The Diffusion of Information in Early America, 1700-1865 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989). Hall and Warner are particularly useful for explaining the importance of print in New England, while Brown offers the most detailed discussion of the means by which information was distributed in the colonies.

2. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983).

3. In Settler Capitalism: The Dynamics of Dependent Development in the Southern Hemisphere (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), Donald Denoon identifies versions of exceptionalism in the historiography of such settler societies as South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, Uruguay, Chile, and Argentina, which indicates that such exceptionalism is not unique to North America or even to British colonies. Ian Tyrrell, in "American Exceptionalism in an Age of International History," American Historical Review 96 (1991): 1031-55, notes that "in an era of unprecedented internationalization in historiography, the legacies of nationalism and exceptionalism still haunt the study of American history" (1031). In our estimation, the only way to avoid the problem posed by the alternatives of nationalism and exceptionalism is to historicize nationalism. We have chosen to do so by showing that the discursive phenomena associated with exceptionalism can also be identified with the emergence of a modern middle class and thus with a new brand of nationalism in Europe. We thank Michael Denning for calling the work of Denoon and of Tyrrell to our attention.

4. Lennard Davis, Factual Fictions: The Origins of the English Novel (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), Nancy Armstrong, Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), Michael McKeon, The Origins of the English Novel, 1600-1740 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), and J. Paul Hunter, Before Novels: The Cultural Contexts of Eighteenth-Century Fiction (New York: W. W. Norton, 1990), are among the most important of recent attempts to fix such an origin for the English novel.

5. Samuel Richardson, Pamela; or, Virtue Rewarded, ed. William M. Sale, Jr. (New York: W. W. Norton, 1958).

6. It is reasonable to ask how this heroine differed from the heroines of such Elizabethan plays as Greene's Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay or Thomas Heywood's Fair Maid of the West . In Greene's play, for example, the inherent desirability of Margaret is meant to challenge the ideology of Petrarchanism that characterized Elizabethan romantic comedies. The prince's son falls in love with Margaret, the keeper's daughter, only to pass her on to the Earl of Lincoln, whom she really adores, and who woos her much as if the royal gaze itself has given her new value. Unlike the heroines of eighteenth-century domestic fiction, Margaret does not bring her values with her into the aristocratic household when she marries. Much the same elevation of a woman to aristocratic status occurs in The Fair Maid, where Bess the bar girl undergoes a trial of her chastity and fidelity. In neither play is the commoner allowed to transform aristocratic culture; aristocratic culture transforms the girl. For a discussion of how Jacobean city comedies modified these conventions, and yet in their use of the nonaristocratic female were different from eighteenth-century novels, see Leonard Tennenhouse, Power on Display: The Politics of Shakespeare's Genres (New York: Methuen, 1986), pp. 154-71.

7. As in preceding centuries, sleeping arrangements in the early eighteenth century might place two or more unrelated people of different sexes and classes in the same bed. J. M. Beattie describes the case of a clerk accused of "assault with intent to ravish" his master's young daughter "with whom he shared a bed in his master's house. The child had been found 'inflam'd and excoriated' and was discovered to have the clap. [The clerk] had blamed it on a ten-year-old boy who also slept with them, but a doctor testified that it was not possible such a Youth should contract the foul Disease and give it to a child." Crime and the Courts in England, 1660-1800 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986), pp. 127-28. This was one of the few cases of rape prosecuted during the eighteenth century. The fact of three people sleeping together was not considered unusual. Beattie contends that, during the eighteenth century, such cases were unlikely to be brought to court unless the victim were a child. A study of Old Bailey indictments indicates the same lack of legal attention to rape at the very time when Richardson wanted readers to consider a sexual assault the gravest threat to a woman's identity. Of seventy-three victims on record, "seventy-one were females.... More than half were under the age of eleven years; it is not clear," the study concludes, "why cases of alleged rape of adults seldom came to trial." Thomas R. Forbes, Surgeons at the Bailey: English Forensic Medicine to 1878 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985), p. 88. We thank Susan Sage Heinzelman for calling this study to our attention.

8. It should be noted that Pamela's parents have enough education to write good standard English; Richardson included their letters among those being assembled as models for young women to imitate. Equally important, apparently Pamela's father once owned property. He writes to her, "We are, 'tis true, very poor, and find it hard to live; though once, as you know, it was better with us"

(5). This makes Pamela's station as a servant relatively fluid. It does not, however, place her in the social group that, according to Lawrence Stone and Jeanne Fawtier Stone, allowed its members to fall in and out of respectability through marriage and ownership of property. According to their An Open Elite? England, 1540-1880 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1984), the gentry was an extremely fluid social group from which one could decline by necessity to the status of a merchant, and to which tradesmen could rise, given sufficient prosperity. In 1710, Richard Steele is quoted as claiming, "as did many others before and after him, that 'the best of our peers have often joined themselves to the daughters of very ordinary tradesmen upon ... valuable considerations' " (20). Pamela is not of this station; but even if she were potential gentry (as Clarissa is), her desirability as a wife to someone decidedly above her would remain essentially the same. Her decline according to one system of values—that associated with the "old" society, and especially with an older middle class—occurs simultaneously with her rise according to another system of values (private virtue, companionship, femininity), associated with the new class and its rise to hegemony.

9. Defoe's On Religious Courtship (1722) can be regarded as an exception to this rule. That the text was neither received as fiction nor recuperated by literary criticism later on testifies, we feel, to its lack of the features we are identifying with captivity narratives.

10. In their influential treatise Practical Education, Maria and her father Robert Edgeworth recommended Robinson Crusoe as more suitable reading for girls than boys. "To girls this species of reading cannot be as dangerous as to boys: girls must soon perceive the impossibility of their rambling about the world in quest of adventure" (111). Their logic has another side. Just as it was assumed young ladies would never imagine imitating Crusoe's economic adventure, so it was understood that the female readers could benefit from the example of a hero who assembled a self-enclosed household where money was not the most important thing.

11. Ian Watt acknowledges his inability to explain why the puritanical Richardson should have made "his entry into the history of literature by a work which gave a more detailed account of a single intrigue than had ever been produced before." If their economic interests are what define them as a group, why indeed should the new business-oriented readership have been so interested in the protracted seduction of a nonaristocratic female? The Rise of the Novel (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1957), p. 172.

12. In his study Before Novels, Hunter identifies most of the kinds of writing that went into the novel and whose characteristics we locate in captivity narratives—the didactic guide book, the spiritual autobiography, sensational journalism, tales of wonder, and travel books. We would argue that, although all the ingredients for the novel were certainly in English culture before novels, the recipe for combining them had to be developed outside the geographical boundaries of modern England. The novel is, from this perspective, a colonial formation.

13. For the place of domestic fiction in the middle-class hegemony, see Armstrong, Desire and Domestic Fiction, pp. 59-95.

14. See R. W. G. Vail, The Voice of the Old Frontier (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1949), pp. 29-61.

15. There is considerable evidence that Jesuit accounts were rarely intended for a general readership. Father Jogues begins his narrative with this explanation as to why he chose to write in Latin rather than French: "Reverend Father in Christ—the Peace of Christ. Wishing, as I do, to write your reverence, I hesitate first in which language to address you, after such long disuse, almost equally forgetful of both, I find equal difficulty in each. Two reasons, however, induce me to use the less common idiom. I shall be better able to use the words of Holy Scripture.... I also wished this letter to be less open to all." "Captivity of Father Isaac Jogues, of the Society of Jesus, Among the Mohawks," in Held Captive by Indians, ed. Richard VanDerBeets (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1973), pp. 4-5.

16. The material of these anti-tales could be found in letters and official documents concerning captives who chose not to return when given the choice, as reported by Alice C. Baker in True Stories of New England Captives (Cambridge: E. A. Hall, 1897) and Emma Lewis Coleman in New England Captives Carried to Canada between 1677 and 1760 during the French and Indian Wars, 2 vols. (Portland, Maine: Southworth Press, 1925). Such accounts provided the basis for a paragraph in the Treaty of Utrecht (1713) that details the exchange of prisoners. The treaty gave those who converted to Catholicism during their captivity the choice of remaining in Canada.

17. We are summarizing here the information in Kathryn Zabelle Derounian, "The Publication, Promotion, and Distribution of Mary Rowlandson's Indian Captivity Narrative in the Seventeenth Century," Early American Literature 23 (1988): 239-61, and in Vail, Voice of the Old Frontier .

18. We rely on Vail, Voice of the Old Frontier, for these details of the printing history of Rowlandson's account.

19. Cotton Mather, for example, reported the accounts of Mehetable Goodwin, Mary Plaisted, and Mary Ferguson in his sermons, and transcribed that of Hannah Swarton; see Vail, Voice of the Old Frontier .

20. Carroll Smith-Rosenberg argues that the same bundle of discursive features that made England fall in love with Pamela took the colonial readership by storm within a few years of that novel's success in England. Furthermore, she describes Richardson's narrative in terms that support our model of the captivity narrative and its political effects: "Novels of social realism, Pamela and Clarissa ... focused on the plight of the woman/individual in the harsh commercial world, be it the world of domestic service or of the eighteenth century's heartless marriage market. In both novels, the virtuous young woman is cut loose from the protection of family and friends. Finally, problematizing both class and the family, these novels privileged the woman as writer and the empowering nature of her words." "Misprisioning Pamela: Representations of Gender and Class in Nineteenth-Century America," Michigan Quarterly Review 26 (1987): 21.

21. In "The Figure of Captivity: The Cultural Work of the Puritan Captivity Narrative," American Literary History 3 (1991): 1-26, Tara Fitzpatrick distinguishes the narratives that featured female captives as those which posed a peculiar problem for Puritan divines: "They vacillated, at once decrying the sinfulness of the generation that had tempted God's fury by straying from the 'hedge' of the covenanted community and then extolling the enlightenment accessible only to those whom God had chosen to try by fire in the wilderness" (9). This double-edged theological message was apparently all the more problematic because the messenger was a woman (5). We are suggesting that the very qualities posing a theological problem for these divines solved an ideological problem for an emergent colonial culture. Fitzpatrick neglects to account for the fact that in novels that observed the Rowlandson model, these women were "authors" rather than prophetic speakers. They narrated their own histories, histories of themselves not only as Christians in relation to God but also—and perhaps more importantly—as Englishwomen who demonstrated the power of their kind of literacy in the midst of a non-English culture. No matter that they, much like Pamela, were ventriloquized or filtered through the writings of one or another male. They nevertheless existed in print and persisted for readers as the female source of a distinctively British American experience.

22. We feel justified in drawing this equation between Indian captivity and slavery because there is a striking resemblance between these seventeenth- and early-eighteenth-century descriptions of captivity and the language that would later be found in African-American slave narratives. The similarities include references to one's captor as "master," the representation of the captive as someone who no longer owns her or his own body, comparisons between the captive and a beast of burden, and the fact that the writer had been seized under conditions resembling war. These same features identify the slave in the political discourse of the seventeenth century as someone who does not have to be considered a man.

23. The heritage of captivity narratives sheds some light on why the English in India responded to the mutiny of 1857 with tales of rape when there was little evidence of sexual violence. English readiness to characterize a native insurrection against the colonial government as involving the rape and massacre of innocents can be attributed to a tradition of representing English colonialism, not as aggression on the Europeans' part, but as a situation where the native population threatened the lives and virtues of English women and children, putting Englishness itself at risk. This narrative tradition clearly gathered strength after eighteenth-century fiction had turned the threat to the English captive into a sexual threat.

24. Mary Rowlandson was captured by Algonquins. Her master was a Narragansett and the squaw with whom Rowlandson lived was a Pocasset. The narrative, however, does not distinguish among the Algonquins but lumps them together as Indians. In recent years, scholars have tried to avoid this generic category. We have retained it in order to remain faithful to Rowlandson's practice. We refer to her captors as she does, as belonging to a single nation rather than to different tribes. It should be noted that the important difference for her was not racial (red versus white) but national (Indian versus English). For a discussion of this point, see Robert F. Berkhofer, Jr., The White Man's Indian: Images of the American Indian from Columbus to the Present (New York: Knopf, 1978), pp. 3-25, and Francis Jennings, The Ambiguous Iroquois Empire: The Covenant Chain Confederation of Indian Tribes with English Colonies from Its Beginnings to the Lancaster Treaty of 1744 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1984), p. 5.

25. Captivity accounts by Hannah Swarton, Hanna Dustan, Elizabeth Hanson, John Williams, and John Gyles are among those which set the English off against the Indians, French, and Catholics. After being a slave to two successive Indian masters, Gyles was apparently sold to a French master. His narrative frequently notes differences between the English and the Indians, the English and the ''Papists," and the English and the French. When his French mistress hears an English force is likely to attack her region, she asks Gyles not to reveal where valuables are hidden. "Madam," he replies, "it is contrary to the nature of the English to requite evil for good. I shall endeavor to serve you and your interest." "Memoirs of Odd Adventures, Strange Deliverances, etc. in the Captivity of John Gyles," in Puritans among the Indians: Accounts of Captivity and Redemption, 1676-1724, ed. Alden T. Vaugh and Edward W. Clark (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981), p. 129. A comment by Williams indicates the degree to which he assumed that retaining one's Englishness during captivity depended on retaining the language: "We have reason to bless God who has wrought deliverance for so many, and yet to pray to God for a door of escape to be opened for the great number yet behind, not much short of an hundred, many of which are children, and of these not a few among the savages and having lost the English tongue, will be lost and turn savages in a little time." "The Redeemed Captive Returning to Zion," in Puritans among the Indians, p. 225. On second-generation captivity narratives see Roy Harvey Pearce, "The Significances of the Captivity Narrative," American Literature 19 (1949): 1-20 and Tara Fitzpatrick, "The Figure of Captivity," 1-26.

26. The power that traditionally accrued to English colonial discourse when it seemed to issue from the body of a victim is discussed in "Introduction: Representing Violence; or, 'How the West Was Won,'" in The Violence of Representation: Literature and the History of Violence, ed. Nancy Armstrong and Leonard Tennenhouse (New York: Routledge, 1989), pp. 1-26.

27. "A Narrative of the Captivity and Restauration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson," in So Dreadfull a Judgement: Puritan Responses to King Philip's War, 1676-1677, ed. Richard Slotkin and James K. Folsom (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1978), p. 335.

28. "A Narrative of Hannah Swarton Containing Wonderful Passages Relating to Her Captivity and Deliverance," in Puritans among the Indians, p. 154.

29. This European practice of seeing non-European landscapes as blank was not confined to the Americas. According to J. M. Coetzee, from 1652 to the end of the eighteenth century, European writers frequently found the South African landscape illegible. They did not regard the Hottentots as having any culture, because their way of life lacked European features much as the landscape did. "Idleness in South Africa," in Violence of Representation, pp. 119-39.

30. In The Lay of the, Land (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1975), Annette Kolodny describes the relationship of English subjects to the North American landscape in terms that exactly invert the way gender actually operates in the captivity narratives we have been discussing. Indeed, one might even understand the puritan captivity narrative as rewriting the lush pastoralism that first attracted earlier settlers to Virginia. Where that landscape was represented as a fecund female nature that could be captured and improved by a contrastingly masculine European culture, the New England landscape that Rowlandson describes is either inert and lifeless or else seething with demonic masculinity. When the colonial subject is female, by implication colonial control of such a landscape has to be imagined in terms of labor and domestication rather than capture and rape.

31. Precisely the sort of narrative that bases national identity on a print vernacular rather than on a sacred text would distinguish the New World nation from its Old World counterpart. Benedict Anderson suggests that the difference between the Christian nation and the modern nation is a matter of what one would die for. The newer idea of the nation "is always conceived as a deep horizontal comradeship." Imagined Communities, p. 16.

32. In his extensive study, American Puritanism and the Defense of Mourning: Religion, Grief, and Ethnology in Mary Rowlandson's Captivity Narrative (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990), Mitchell Robert Breitwieser argues that Rowlandson's work is realistic because it "is an account of experience that breaks through or outdistances her own and her culture's dominant means of representation, and because it is itself a continuation of that breakthrough rather than a fully composed and tranquilized recollection" (10). By reading Rowlandson as a modern subject, Breitweiser inadvertently supports our contention that Rowlandson's style of narration exceeds the historical limitations of her time because it provided the basis for the English novel and thus for later styles of psychological realism.

33. In a paper entitled "Red, Black, and Female: Constituting the American Subject," presented at the University of California Humanities Institute Research Seminar on Poststructuralism and History (1990), Carroll Smith-Rosenberg argues that the masculine representation of imperialism, in which America is a supine woman, changed decisively in the nineteenth century to one in which America is a captive woman. We wish to thank her for sharing that manuscript with us.

34. David Hall notes that in seventeenth-century New England the word illiterate signified an ignorance of Latin: "By this standard, all but a mere handful of the colonists were illiterate. Yet, though ordinary people were excluded from the world of Latin, they were comfortably acquainted with the language of their Bibles. To be sure, many wrote with difficulty, or not at all. But when defined as the skill of reading English, literacy was almost universal." World of Wonder, Days of Judgment: Popular Religious Belief in Early New England (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990), p. 32. E. Jennifer Monaghan argues that a substantial percentage of women in Colonial America could read but could not sign their names, in "Literacy Instruction and Gender in Colonial New England," in Reading in America: Literature and Social History, ed. Cathy N. Davidson (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), pp. 53-80. Margaret Spufford has made a similar argument with regard to England, in Small Books and Pleasant Histories: Popular Fiction and Its Readership in Seventeenth-Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), pp. 22-35.

35. Elizabeth Hanson, "God's Mercy Surmounting Man's Cruelty," in Puritans among the Indians, p. 237.

36. Ellen Lansky first called this resemblance to our attention. We are very much in her debt for this insight.

37. Quoted in Derounian, "Rowlandson's Indian Captivity Narrative in the Seventeenth Century," p. 244.

38. Quoted in ibid., p. 249.

37. Quoted in Derounian, "Rowlandson's Indian Captivity Narrative in the Seventeenth Century," p. 244.

38. Quoted in ibid., p. 249.

39. In Shamela, one of the many lessons Oliver draws from Pamela is: "All Chambermaids are strictly enjoyned to look out after their Masters; they are taught to use little Arts to that purpose: And lastly, are countenanced in Impertinence to their Superiors, and in betraying the Secrets of Families." Henry Fielding, Joseph Andrews, with Shamela and Related Writings, ed. Homer Goldberg (New York: W. W. Norton, 1987), p. 305. In The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1957), p. 270, Ian Watt discusses Fielding's conservative view—his belief in a "class fixity"—as the basis for a fundamental difference between Richardson's novels and those by Fielding.

40. In Regeneration through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600-1860 (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1973) Richard Slotkin makes the important observation that "whereas early emigration and Indian war tracts portrayed English colonization metaphorically as Exodus—the journey of Israel from a fallen Egypt to the Promised Land—the captivity narratives portrayed it as a figurative Babylonian captivity, an exile from a lost, conquered, and debased promised land of England" (93). We would simply add that the promised "return" is an essential feature of the biblical prophecies that were directed at the faithful who were carried off into captivity in Egypt, Assyria, or Babylon. See, for example, Amos 9:13-15, Isaiah 10:20-23, and Jeremiah 23:1-6.

41. In "The Figure of Captivity," Fitzpatrick compares Rowlandson's account with the later narrative of John Williams. She notes that where "the atomizing tendencies of the woman's narratives had challenged the theological unity, now a man's narrative would recreate that unity on political and increasingly rationalistic grounds" (18-19). She notes further how "striking [it is] that women were among the leading creators of a mythology that has since had so resonantly masculine a voice'' (20). The operations of gender in this narrative cease to cause bewilderment, however, as Armstrong has argued in Desire and Domestic Fiction, pp. 1-27, once one is willing to entertain the possibility that the modern subject was not only first and foremost a writing subject but also a woman who could claim no political power save that of literacy alone. Our comparison of Rowlandson with Richardson argues that this was the case in England as well as in North America. Both of these narratives use the woman to dramatize the rise to hegemony of writing over speech.

42. Breitwieser has discussed Rowlandson's inability to reintegrate with the community upon her return as her inability to complete the mourning process. American Puritanism, pp. 119-29.

43. Slotkin notes that the popularity of captivity narratives peaked between 1680 and 1716, and that between 1680 and 1720 three out of the four bestsellers in America were captivity narratives (the fourth was The Pilgrim's Progress ). And, he writes, "even after 1720 the tales of captivity continued to be popular, although they shared the market with other types of narrative; and the first tentative American efforts at short fiction and the 'first American novel' (Brown's Edgar Huntly ) were very much in the vein of captivity narratives." Regeneration through Violence, pp. 95-96.

44. In discussing Richardson's influence on nineteenth-century American fiction and on the reform movement, Smith-Rosenberg notes: "Indeed, the family does not transform Pamela; instead Pamela, as the upwardly mobile individual, transforms the family, making both her parents' family and Mr. B's family middle class.... Just as Pamela never goes home again to her parents' poor cottage, a person, transformed into an individual by the new commercial economy, could no longer return to the family—unless she transforms it in turn." "Misprisoning Pamela, " p. 22.

45. Renato Rosaldo, "Imperialist Nostalgia," in Culture and Truth: The Remaking of Social Analysis (Boston: Beacon Press, 1989), pp. 68-87.

46. We are drawing here on Homer Obed Brown's forthcoming book, Institutions of the English Novel (Oxford University Press). We thank him for allowing us to read the chapter on the process by which nineteenth-century writers created a place in the canon for Defoe.

47. We were encouraged to pursue our present course of argument by Cathy N. Davidson's statement, "Everyone knows that the first American fiction imitated earlier British originals, but we are not so sure just what that means. Did 'the American novel' imitate 'the British novel' (phrases which assume each national product was monolithic and the influence equally so)? Or did Charles Brockden Brown imitate William Godwin? ... Yet Godwin in his 1817 Preface to Mandeville acknowledged his debt to Brown, and Brown was also credited with influencing Godwin's daughter, Mary, and her husband, Percy Bysshe Shelley." Revolution and the Word: The Rise of the Novel in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), p. 10. However, Davidson focuses on how American writers used the conventions of the English novel as "a political and cultural forum"; she does not ask how conventions of the American novel might have been used by English authors as a political and cultural forum back in England.

48. in The Development of American Romance: The Sacrifice of Relation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), Michael Davitt Bell encapsulates the dominant view: "The story of British influence on American fiction is fascinating and important, but it is not the whole story. What seems even more fascinating—to me, as ... to many others—is the story of how British models were transformed, transmuted, or regenerated by American conditions" (4). Jay Fliegelman, Prodigals and Pilgrims: The American Revolution against Patriarchal Authority, 1750-1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), makes a singular effort to bring the captivity narrative to bear on a discussion of the American novel (140-48). In doing so, however, he does not challenge the prevailing belief that the English novel was the literary prototype of the American novel.