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Familial Forms is the first full-length study to examine how literary writers engaged the politics of genealogy that helped define the “century of revolution.” By demonstrating how conflicts over the family-state analogy intersected with the period’s battles over succession, including: the ascent of James I, the execution of Charles I, disputes over the terms of the Interregnum government, the Restoration of Charles II, the Exclusion Crisis, the deposition of James II, the ascent of William and Mary, and Anne’s failure to produce a surviving heir, this study provides a new map of the seventeenth-century politics of family in England. Beginning with a reconsideration of Jacobean patriarchalism, Familial Forms focuses on the work of John Milton, Lucy Hutchinson, John Dryden, and Mary Astell. From their contrasting political and gendered positions, these authors contemplated and contested the relevance of marriage and kinship to government. Their writing illuminates two crucial elements of England’s conflicts. First, the formal qualities of poems and prose tracts reveal that not only was there a competition among different versions of the family-state analogy, but also a competition over its very status as an analogy. Second, through their negotiations of linear and nonlinear forms, Milton, Hutchinson, Dryden, and Astell demonstrate the centrality of temporality to the period’s political battles.

Through close textual analysis of poetry, political tracts, parliamentary records, and nonliterary genealogies, Familial Forms offers a fresh understanding of the seventeenth-century politics of genealogy. It also provides new answers to long-standing critical questions about the poetic form of canonical works, such as Paradise Lost and Absalom and Achitophel, and illuminates the political significance of newly-canonical works by women writers, including Aemilia Lanyer’s Salve Deus Rex Judaeoreum, Hutchinson’s Order and Disorder, and Astell’s A Serious Proposal to the Ladies.

Published by University of Delaware Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.

In this fiercely ambitious study, Meredith Anne Hoy seeks to reestablish the very definitions of digital art and aesthetics in art history. She begins by problematizing the notion of digital aesthetics, tracing the nineteenth- and twentieth-century movements that sought to break art down into its constituent elements, which in many ways predicted and paved the way for our acceptance of digital art. Through a series of case studies, Hoy questions the separation between analog and digital art and finds that while there may be sensual and experiential differences, they fall within the same technological categories. She also discusses computational art, in which the sole act of creation is the building of a self-generating algorithm. The medium isn’t the message—what really matters is the degree to which the viewer can sense a creative hand in the art.