Transforming the word

"The radical prophets of the English civil wars were fascinating figures, living at the very margins of seventeenth-century English society. Combining a devout belief in the power of divine inspiration with a passionate desire for social change and a distinctly eccentric rhetorical style, these men and women brazenly challenged civil and religious authority and flouted social decorum, unnerving their contemporaries and fanning fears of social anarchy.

Unfortunately, far too little is known about the fate of their ideas, their writings, and their successors between the restoration of Charles II and the rise of the poetry of sensibility in the mid-eighteenth century. Too often they are assumed merely to have disappeared soon after 1660, snuffed out by a restored monarchy and an Augustan culture antithetical to their aims, and lost to sight until they were rediscovered in the late 1720s by a new generation of poets intrigued by vatic inspiration.".

"The purpose of this study is to suggest a rather different legacy for the radical prophets of the mid-seventeenth century. It contends, first of all, that prophecy was a significant genre for the writers of the Restoration and early eighteenth century - far more prevalent, more pervasive, and more influential in the decades following 1660 than has traditionally been acknowledged.

From Butler's Hudibras, to Dryden's Mac Flecknoe, to the portrayal of Settle in Pope's first version of The Dunciad, prophets rant, rage, and wreak havoc through even the most canonical of Augustan texts, revealing the period's obsession with the figure of the radical prophet."--BOOK JACKET.