Product Description: Annabel M. Patterson offers here a reassessment of the place of Hermogenes, a Greek rhetorician of the second century A.D., in literary history. She shows that the literary men of the European Renaissance-scholars, critics, and poets-found Hermogenes' Concerning Ideas both important and extremely useful, and she finds that they vigorously applied his concepts to create "a lovely conformitie...read more

Product Description: Andrew Marvell (1621–78) is best known today as the author of a handful of exquisite lyrics and provocative political poems. In his own time, however, Marvell was famous for his brilliant prose interventions in the major issues of the Restoration, religious toleration, and what he called “arbitrary” as distinct from parliamentary government...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

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Product Description: Is history driven more by principle or interest? Are ideas of historical progress obsolete? Is it unforgivable to change one’s mind or political allegiance? Did the eighteenth century really exchange the civilizing force of commercial advantage for political conflict? In this new account of liberal thought from its roots in seventeenth-century English thinking to the end of the eighteenth century, Annabel Patterson tackles these important historiographical questions...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

This study on Andrew Marvell looks at both his political poetry and his often neglected political prose, revealing his life long commitment to writing about the standards of public life, freedom of conscience and constitutional government. (view table of contents)

Product Description: In this imaginative and illuminating work, Annabel Patterson traces the origins and meanings of the Aesopian fable, as well as its function in Renaissance culture and subsequently. She shows how the fable worked as a medium of political analysis and communication, especially from or on behalf of the politically powerless...read more

Product Description: Annabel Patterson challenges the common opinion that Shakespeare was anti-democratic, contemptuous of the crowd and an unfailing supporter of the Elizabethan social hierarchy. She argues that this view originated in the 19thcentury and was rendered influential, especially by Coleridge, as a part of anti-Jacobin propaganda; and that in reality, Shakespeare engaged in a rigorous critique of his society, which is given fullest expression in "Coriolanus"...read more