Reading Holinshed's Chronicles is the first major study of the greatest of the Elizabethan chronicles. Holinshed's Chronicles-a massive history of England, Scotland, and Ireland-has been traditionally read as the source material for many of Shakespeare's plays or as an archaic form of history-writing. Annabel Patterson insists that the Chronicles be read in their own right as an important and inventive cultural history.

Although we know it by the name of Raphael Holinshed, editor and major compiler of the 1577 edition, the Chronicles was the work of a group, a...

While the term "liberalism" was not applied to political thought or political parties in England until the late eighteenth century, the author argues that its central ideas were formulated by seventeenth-century English writers in defiance of their society's norms, and then transmitted to the American colonies. In this study Annabel Patterson is particularly concerned with the means and agents of transmission, and with those who sought to ensure that the liberal canon would be preserved, dispersed and republished.

In Shakespeare and the Popular Voice Annabel Patterson challenges as counter-intuitive the common opinion that Shakespeare was anti-democratic, contemptuous of the crowd and an unfailing supporter of Elizabethan social hierarchy.

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.
Patterson begins with an analysis of the legendary "Life" of Aesop, its cultural history and philosophical implications, a topic that involves such widely separated figures as La Fontaine, Hegel, and Vygotsky. The myth's origin is recovered here in the saving myth of...

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.
Patterson begins with an analysis of the legendary "Life" of Aesop, its cultural history and philosophical implications, a topic that involves such widely separated figures as La Fontaine, Hegel, and Vygotsky. The myth's origin is recovered here in the saving myth of...

Charles II's first and most important parliament sat for eighteen years without a general election, earning itself the sobriquet "Long." In 1661 this parliament began in eager compliance with the new king. Gradually disillusioned by Charles's maneuvers, however, its members came to demand more control of the economy, religion, and foreign policy, starting a struggle that led to the Exclusion crisis. This lively book is the first full study of this Restoration Parliament.

Using parliamentary diaries, newsletters, memoirs, letters from members of parliament, scofflaw pamphlets, and the...

Annabel Patterson here turns her well-known concern with political history in early modern England into an engine for investigating our own era and a much wider terrain. The focus of this book is, broadly, nationalism and internationalism today, approached not theoretically but through the lens of fiction. Novels are uniquely capable of dealing with abstract problems by embodying them in the experience of persons, thereby rendering them more "real." Patterson takes twelve novels from (almost) all over the world: India, Africa, Turkey, Crete, the Balkans, Palestine, Afghanistan, South America,...

The outlines of contemporary critical theory are now often taught as a standard feature of a degree in literary studies. This text aims to explore the theoretical issues and conflicts embodied in selected essays of John Milton and locate areas of disagreement between positions.