Andrea Brady

Dying with Honour: Literary Propaganda and the Second English Civil War

This article discusses contemporary responses to the executions under martial law of Sir Charles Lucas and Sir George Lisle in 1648, following General Thomas Fairfaxs siege of Colchester. It compares the royalist propaganda, which established these two royalist partisans as martyred heroes, to the Parliamentary and Army propaganda, which lamented the assassination of the well-known New Model Army colonel Thomas Rainsborough two months later. Analysing newsbooks, accounts by participants and observers, and literary responses (especially the elegy), it finds that popular writers used these deaths to impugn the honour of their opponents, and consequently to argue against reconciliation or compromise.

The subject of sacrifice in John Wilkinson's Down to Earth

This article discusses John Wilkinsons volume Down to Earth (2008), and in particular the use of the trope of sacrifice in that books examination of the violence inherent in capitalism. Making a comparison with Wilkinsons Proud Flesh (1986), it suggests that Wilkinson has maintained a consistent interest in the relation of repressed intimacy between the subject and its objects, both psychic symbols and the commodity form. This article analyses the relation between subject and object in each poem, focusing particularly on their accounts of the fragmentation of the self, the perceptions and pleasures of infancy, the exploitation of the worker by the consumer, and the unknowability of the other. It distinguishes Wilkinsons parodic account from the radical potentiality which Bataille finds in sacrifice, and considers how Marxist perspectives (including the writings of Adorno and Horkheimer) as well as psychoanalytic ones (Lacan, object relations theory, and Anzieu) inform Wilkinsons representation of the object world.

‘A share of sorrows’: Death in the Early Modern English Household

A death in the household temporarily set a family apart. If they could afford it, early modern families adopted mourning dress, hung escutcheons on the house and swathed rooms with black baize. The poorest families could reflect their distinction in grief through alterations of comportment, daily routine, speech and attitude. The funeral helped to reintegrate these displaced families into the community and to regulate their grief. It is generally the case that, although deep grief might be countenanced within the household as the ‘natural’ response to loss, mourners were subject to stricter discipline when they left its bounds and assumed their social roles as members of a community, congregation or class. But funeral decorum could not always contain individual displays of inventive, spontaneous and personal sorrow. And the idea that the household served as a limit for emotional display is misleading, as the space of the home was regularly filled with visitors, doctors, ministers and friends, who offered consolation and prevented the indulgence of unchristian or unhealthy melancholy in fulfilment of their neighbourly duty to the bereaved. As the accounts discussed below reveal, modern notions of public and private spaces did not apply in early modern England. David Cressy argues that ‘the early modern world allowed no separate private sphere (in the modern sense), no place where public activity did not intrude.

The Pledge of Allegiance

2) ‘Citizen Communication” Public comment can he provided on any item on the agenda or on issues affecting the City not on the agcnda. Public comments should generally be limited to 3-5 minutes. Citizens are encouraged (bul not required) to contact City Administration one week prior to the meeting, preferably in writing, to be placed on the agenda. Doing so provides Council an opportunity to give consideration to the issuecomment.