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by Melissa Mowry (Author)
Political, literary, and cultural historians of the early modern Anglophone world have long characterized the crucial century between 1642 and 1742 as the period when absolutist theories of sovereignty yielded their dominance to shared models of governance and a burgeoning doctrine of unalienable, individual rights. Yet even the most cursory glance at the cultural record, reveals that individualism was largely a footnote to a conflict over the production of political and cultural authority that erupted around the middle of the seventeenth century between sovereignty and collectivity. Collective Understanding, Radicalism, and Literary History reaches back to the English civil wars (1642-46, 1648) when a distinctive and anti-authoritarian hermeneutic emerged from the dissident community known as the Levellers. Active between 1645 and 1653, the Levellers argued that a more just political order required that knowledge, previously structured by the epistemology of singularity upon
which sovereignty had built its authority, be reorganized around the interpretive principles and practices of affiliation and collectivity.
Author Biography
Melissa Mowry, Professor of English, St John's University
2013, her article Past Remembrance or History (ELH 79.3) was the recipient of the American Society for Eighteenth Century Studies' James L. Clifford Award.
