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 (al...

Annabel Patterson tackles the hottest topic in literary studies today - `the Great Books debate - providing a superbly formulated moderate stance between the Western canon's radical oppponents and its zealous protectors.

The International Killer Thriller focuses on the extremely successful novels of Daniel Silva, who has pulled off the daunting task of writing, in short order, a series of novels with the same protagonist—Gabriel Allon, a world-famous assassin whom we are to regard as our hero. Originally hired by Israel on the order of Golda Meir to avenge the assassination of the Jewish athletic team at the Munich Olympics, Gabriel has been called upon subsequently by his government and then by those of B...

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 se...

State trials provided some of the leading media events of later Stuart England. The more important of these trials attracted substantial public attention, serving as pivot points in the relationship between the state and its subjects. Later Stuart England has been known among legal historians for a series of key cases in which juries asserted their independence from judges. In political history, the government's sometimes shaky control over political trials in this period has long been tak...

This collection of selected writings represents the best of recent critical work on Milton. The essays cover all stages of his career, from the early poems through to the later poems of the Restoration period, especially Paradise Lost. Professor Patterson includes British and American critics such as Michael Wilding, Victoria Kahn, James Grantham Turner and Mary Ann Radzinowicz and guides the reader through the varied ways Milton's achievement has been explored and debated by mode...

Marvell: The Writer in Public Life is substantially revised from Professor Patterson's well received 1978 study, including a new introduction and new chapter on Marvell and secret history. This important study provides an up to date perspective on a writer still thought of merely as the author of lyric and pastoral poems. It looks at both Marvell's political poetry and his often neglected political prose, revealing Marvell's life long commitment to writing about the values and sta...