The Emergence Of Quaker Writing: Dissenting Literature In Seventeenth-Century England

Book Summary

Among the radical sects which flourished during the tumultuous years of the English Revolution, the early Quakers were particularly aware of the power of the written word to promote their prophetic visions and unorthodox beliefs. During the first years of their movement, as they spread aggressively throughout England, they produced hundreds of tracts which fiercely denounced temporal authorities, attacked orthodox Puritanism, rejected social hierarchies and set forms of worship, promoted the ideology of the Lamb's War, and proclaimed the power of the light within. At the Restoration and in the subsequent years of sharpest persecution, the movement evolved other literary voices to chronicle its suffering and to urge the perseverance of its oppressed members. As persecution eased, other Quaker idioms developed, more consonant with an emergent quietism. This collection of new essays by literary scholars and historians looks at the diversity of seventeenth-century Quaker writing, examining its rhetoric, its polemical strategies, its purposeful use of the print medium, and the heroism and vehemence of its world vision. Among the radical sects which flourished during the tumultuous years of the English Revolution, the early Quakers were particularly aware of the power of the written word to promote their prophetic visions?and unorthodox beliefs. This collection of new essays by literary scholars and historians looks at the diversity of seventeenth-century Quaker writing, examining its rhetoric, its polemical strategies, its purposeful use of the print medium, and the heroism and vehemence of its world vision.

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