Heroic Mode and Political Crisis, 1660-1745

This book explores a cultural language, the heroic, that remained consistently powerful through the social, political, and dynastic turbulence of the long eighteenth century. The heroic provided an accessible and vivid shorthand for the ongoing ideological debates over the nature of authority and power, the construction of an ideal masculinity, and the shape of a new, British—rather than English—national identity. An analysis of this cultural language and its different valence over time not...