Description: Royalist Identities shifts the emphasis from the question 'What is Royalism?' to 'What did Royalism want to be?' The texts analyzed show how Royalism was concerned with the construction of a set of binary roles and behavioural models designed to perpetuate a certain paradigm of social stability. de Groot deploys theories of identity to analyze the literature and culture of this important period- including the works of Milton, Marvell, Herrick and Cowley, amongst others - and in particular to discuss the formation and construction of an ideologically inflected cultural and social identity.
Review Quotes:
'Jerome de Groot's subject, an important and neglected one, is the Royalists' search, after the outbreak of civil war, for discursive modes and strategies that might structure a new identity and garner support for their party...Royalist Identities opens a fresh critical approach to the pamphlet wars that historians yet need to pursue.' - Times Literary Supplement
'Royalist Identities is to be welcomed for its redress of a historiographical balance that has favoured the Roundheads and for its address to the tropes and textual strategies of the pamphlet exchange through years of shifting circumstances...[it] opens a fresh critical approach to the pamphlet wars that historians yet need to pursue.' - Kevin Sharpe, Times Higher Education Supplement