Publisher's Synopsis
Innumerable men and women in the late 16th and 17th centuries were gripped by the anxiety, often conviction, that they were doomed to go to hell. This condition of mind was commonly enmeshed with circumstances, such as parental severity, social exclusion, and economic decline, which seemed to give cogency to a Calvinist theology specializing in the idea of rejection. "The Persecutory Imagination" investigates, initially in puritan autobiographies and "The Pilgrim's Progress", how a menacing discourse compounding theology and social experience constructs subjectivity and shapes texts. But Calvinist anxiety was not confined to puritan milieux. Until the ascendancy of Laud, Calvinism was the orthodoxy of the Church of England, so that Robert Burton, John Donne, and Christopher Marlowe all produced texts invaded by its discursive influence. Even "Paradise Lost" whose "puritan" author consciously embraced Arminianism, cannot deny the emotional structures of Calvinist culture: out of them grew Milton's Satan. This book challenges both the assumption of authorial autonomy and the emollient treatment of Christianity which has characterized most discussion of literature in this period.
