Poetry and sovereignty in the English Revolution: by Niall Allsopp, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2020, 256 pp., £63.00 (hardback), ISBN 9780198861065.

In the 2002 Afterword to the revised edition of his widely influential monograph I Poetry and Politics in the English Renaissance i (first published in 1984), David Norbrook positions the study as an attempt to eschew oppositions between old and new historicisms, often framed (by new historicists) in terms of "a Dark Ages of simple-minded positivism and a Golden Age of theoretical progress", being concerned instead "to locate opposing radical and conservative traditions of analysis going back to the early modern period itself, and to suggest that the polemics of the early modern period are still inescapably present in today's debates" (271). As Niall Allsopp observes in his shrewd and illuminating new monograph, I Poetry and Sovereignty in the English Revolution i , however, this "structural division between royalists and republicans" imposed a certain conceptual limit to understanding "the contingencies of political allegiance" in writers and writing of the middle seventeenth century (see 1-3 and esp. In its relative narrowness of compass, I Poetry and Sovereignty in the English Revolution i cedes a certain amount of argumentative ground to more capacious surveys of mid-century writing structured around the polarities of royalist and republican. [Extracted from the article]