We found a match
Your institution may have access to this item. Find your institution then sign in to continue.
- Title
Turning <italic>Vanity Fair</italic> into <italic>The Cœlestial City</italic>: England’s Legal Narratives of the Body Politic from Bunyan to Thackeray.
- Authors
Nicolini, Matteo
- Abstract
The article addresses the different narratives that characterize English constitutional history. It first examines the mainstream narrative, i. e., the retrospective reading of the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century constitutional events dispensed by jurists and politicians in an attempt to pack the Establishment Constitution. It then focuses on the alternative legal narratives about the Constitution elaborated during the Civil War and the Restoration. Among them, it ascertains John Bunyan’s impact on the Establishment Constitution. Bunyan was a member of the New Model Army, a radical, and a Puritan who ended up in prison. Despite this background, he exerted a strong influence on Victorian society and on Thackeray’s representation of the body politic. As a consequence, Bunyan entered the political discourse in the first half of the nineteenth century when politicians started to reform English representative institutions, and therefore became part of the Establishment Constitution.
- Subjects
CONSTITUTIONAL history; POLITICAL philosophy; BRITISH history; JUSTICE administration; CIVIL war
- Publication
Pólemos (2035-5262), 2018, Vol 12, Issue 1, p123
- ISSN
2035-5262
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.1515/pol-2018-0008