Abstract
In a period rich in paradoxical situations, surprising connections and unexpected alliances, it is one of the supreme if subtle ironies to find the much-hated chief censor, royalist pamphleteer and persecutor of nonconformists, Sir Roger L’Estrange (1616–1704), on the printed list of subscribers to the fourth edition of Milton’s Paradise Lost in 1688 (cf. Parker 1: 662Q. Focusing on Milton and Bunyan as the crucial figures in late-seventeenth-century religious and political dissent, this essay will explore the intricate interplay between political taboos, censorship, and subversive literary strategies in the period after 1660.1 This context calls for a specific reconceptuali. zation of the notion of “taboo” as not so much a ban on forbidden and socially repressed acts or practices—incest, cannibalism, certain sexual practices, irreligious behavior—that violate societal and individual norms of decency and acceptability. Rather, this essay studies what can quite literally be viewed as a ban on thought, a form of suppressing a set of political ideas and their utterance by means of censorship and other forms of political and legal repression.
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© 2010 Stefan Horlacher, Stefan Glomb, and Lars Heiler
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Gurr, J.M. (2010). The Taboo of Revolutionary Thought after 1660 and Strategies of Subversion in Milton’s Paradise Lost and Bunyan’s The Holy War. In: Horlacher, S., Glomb, S., Heiler, L. (eds) Taboo and Transgression in British Literature from the Renaissance to the Present. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230105997_5
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