N. H. Keeble, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Writing of the English Revolution.

(Cambridge Companions to Literature.) Cambridge, United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press, 2001. xxii + 296 pp. illus, index. $59.95 (cl), $21.95 (pbk). ISBN: 0-52164252-3 (cl), 0-521-64522-0 (pbk).

Until quite recently, students of English literature were, by and large, happy to concur in the myth that literature and the arts were among the first casualties of the English Civil Wars. The period 1642-60 was widely seen as a wasteland that should be avoided or, at least, hurriedly crossed, pausing only to savor the exquisite lyrics of Marvell, or a few representative "Cavaliers." Serious engagement with the "information explosion" that followed the collapse of press censorship was left to historians, who were less troubled than literary critics by the ephemeral, polemical nature of such writing, or by its generically bewildering variety. All that has changed, however, and the last decade has brought a steady flow of literary surveys, monographs, editions, and anthologies aimed at mapping the writing of the period: The Cambridge Companion to Writing of the English Revolution is a welcome introduction and guide to the field.

N. H. Keeble has performed his editorial job with skill and tact, assembling a first-rate band of contributors and encouraging them to produce accessible overviews of their fields aimed at primarily at non-specialists. He has kept the needs of such readers firmly in mind, prefacing the volume with a crisp introduction, two helpful chronologies (the first listing major historical and literary events, the second, authors and their dates), and appending to it a pithy historical glossary.

The volume is neatly divided into five parts, each containing three essays, reflecting the shape of current work in the field. The first provides the necessary context, with a series of finely judged essays on the causes and course of the civil wars (John Morrill), on the conflicting political ideas of the period (Martin Dzelzainis), and on "the printing revolution" which led to the dissemination of so many of the texts here discussed (Sharon Achinstein).

True to its aim of stressing the revolutionary character of the period, the volume emphasizes those new voices and new ideas that found their outlet in such numbers at this time. In part 2 ("Radical Voices"), Thomas Corns surveys the major political and religious sects, David Loewenstein Milton's prose, and Annabel Patterson--making the familiar look startlingly new--the career of Marvell in relation to the revolution. Part 3 examines women's writing, with lively essays on poetry (Susan Wiseman), life-writing (Helen Wilcox and Sheila Ottway), and prophets and enthusiasts (Elaine Hobby).

Despite its radical emphasis, however, the volume is carefully balanced: its fourth part does justice to the "Conservative Voices" of the period through essays on royalist lyric (Alan Rudrum), epic and romance (Paul Salzman), and by way of Isabel Rivers' succinct delineation of a new field: "the literature of the proscribed episcopal church." The fifth and final part takes a longer view, by addressing the afterlife of the Civil Wars, through suggestive essays on their historiography (David Norbrook), and on the later careers of two major writers who will forever be associated with the period: Milton (Nigel Smith) and Bunyan (Richard Greaves). This section is perhaps the least necessary to the design of the volume, but its three essays are among the finest in the collection.

As one would expect from so distinguished a group of contributors, the standard of these essays is impeccable, and they fit together to yield a satisfying whole. There are, I think, just two points on which one might want to quibble. The first is the absence of an essay on the Commonwealth and Protectorate to balance John Morrill's account of the Civil Wars--an essay towards which Morrill's final paragraphs appear to gesture. The second is the slightly bifocal character of the collection as a whole, which seems undecided whether its subject is the English Revolution or the English (or British) Civil Wars--the slippage can be a little jarring as one moves between different contributions and different parts of the collection. This merely reflects the ongoing debate over whether, when, and what the English Revolution was, and one doesn't expect an editor to resolve such questions. A slightly more explicit articulation of the issues at stake might, however, help readers make better sense of a collection that is itself an important contribution to this debate.

TIMOTHY RAYLOR

Carleton College