TY - BOOK AU - Kasa, Deni PY - 2024 DA - 2024// TI - Politics of Grace in Early Modern Literature PB - Stanford University Press CY - Stanford, CA KW - English poetry KW - History and criticism KW - Grace (Theology) in literature KW - Politics and literature KW - Protestant poetry, English KW - LITERARY CRITICISM / European / English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh KW - Cowley KW - Early Modern Literature KW - Education KW - Epic Poetry KW - Humanism KW - Lanyer KW - Milton KW - Political Thought KW - Politics KW - Reformation KW - Spenser AB - This book tells the story of how early modern poets used the theological concept of grace to reimagine their political communities. The Protestant belief that salvation was due to sola gratia, or grace alone, was originally meant to inspire religious reform. But, as Deni Kasa shows, poets of the period used grace to interrogate the most important political problems of their time, from empire and gender to civil war and poetic authority. Kasa examines how four writers—John Milton, Edmund Spenser, Aemilia Lanyer, and Abraham Cowley—used the promise of grace to develop idealized imagined communities, and not always egalitarian ones. Kasa analyzes the uses of grace to make new space for individual and collective agency in the period, but also to validate domination and inequality, with poets and the educated elite inserted as mediators between the gift of grace and the rest of the people. Offering a literary history of politics in a pre-secular age, Kasa shows that early modern poets mapped salvation onto the most important conflicts of their time in ways missed by literary critics and historians of political thought. Grace, Kasa demonstrates, was an important means of expression and a way to imagine impossible political ideals SN - 9781503638310 UR - https://www.degruyter.com/isbn/9781503638310 UR - https://www.degruyter.com/document/cover/isbn/9781503638310/original UR - https://doi.org/10.1515/9781503638310 DO - 10.1515/9781503638310 LA - English N1 - Deni Kasa ID - 1887883177 ER -