How to COPY a Book Proposal

Over at the Chronicle of Higher Education, Rachel Toor explains "How to Write a Good Book Proposal," and she offers some excellent advice, especially for nonfiction writers and novelists. I'd like to chip in here, though, with something for writers of academic books -- and for writers who'd rather copy a form than construct one from a set of instructions.  I probably fall into that later category: give me a formal model (newspaper article, book review, personal essay) and I can usually adapt to it pretty easily, although my eyes glaze over within a paragraph of any guide about "how to" write this or that. It may be a weakness, but it's my weakness. 

So, for those of you who share that weakness, I'm posting the book proposal that I sent to Cambridge University Press and that led to my recently published book. Is it a perfect model? I doubt it. But I did copy it from some pretty good models! One caveat: my final book changed quite a bit from this, both in terms of content and organization. But this was good enough to get me in the door.

Childish Things: The Poetics and Politics of Youth in Milton’s England

Book Proposal

Blaine Greteman

           

            Childish Things argues that coming of age in seventeenth-century England was a uniquely poetic and political act.  Early modern authors used childhood and maturity to address contentious questions of political representation – about who has a voice and who can speak on his or her own behalf.  Writers since Aristotle had described children as creatures of pure mimesis.  Naturally embodying the poetic impulse, children imitated the voices of others as they cultivated more authoritative speech and ultimately left childish babble behind. Early-modern educators, playwrights, and poets repeatedly staged this drama, and if we accept Jacques Rancière’s suggestion that the central problem of all politics is knowing “whether the subjects who count in the interlocution...are speaking or just making a noise” it could not fail to be political. 

            In seventeenth-century England, after all, consent was explicitly figured as voice.  Electors “gave their voices,” shouting assent to select their parliamentary representatives, while those whose age or behavior made them incapable of consent were deemed legal infants, from the Latin infans, “voiceless.” Historians like Mark Kishlansky and Derek Hisrt have shown that government by consent became the new paradigm during this dynamic period, and I argue that the threshold between infancy and adulthood accordingly became the focus of special scrutiny and enormous creative energy. Childish Things focuses on printed and manuscript works by Ben Jonson, John Milton, Thomas Hobbes, and their contemporaries that ask how voice emerges from infancy and how childish speech before that moment complicates ideas of human agency and obligation.  In each case, the ability of poets and dramatists to produce and reproduce powerful voices provides an important part of the answer. According to many humanist pedagogues and the men who learned the dramatic arts in their schools, poetry was a discipline that could “embowlden our youth and try their voices,” as one educator put it.  This disciplinary function encouraged antitheatrical critics like William Prynne to rail against the similarities between infantilizing dramatic representation and a political system where children could become members of Parliament.  But more radical reformers seized on the child’s unruly nature and mimetic responsiveness as a radical resource, a voice of innocence and channel for the divine.   

            Childish Things suggests that we must understand the distinction between youth and age as a power relation constructed in historically specific discourses and social contexts. Over the last forty years, historians have carefully revised Philippe Aries’ claim in Centuries of Childhood (1962) that childhood did not exist as a distinct phase of life before the later seventeenth century, while retaining his sense that concepts of childhood are culturally determined. I draw on this work as I focus on the tendency of seventeenth-century writers to define children in terms of their mimetic capacities and poetic responsiveness, but I shift the center of gravity to explore the seventeenth-century idea that childhood could persist long after sexual maturation.  The cases I examine lie at the outer limits of childishness and extreme precocity, where voters elected twelve-year-olds as Members of Parliament before they could legally vote and theatre impresarios advertised child actors who were actually twenty, thirty, or forty years old.  Historians like Paul Griffiths and Ilana Krausman Ben-Amos describe many of these figures as “youths.”  But Childish Things demonstrates the many ways they continued to be conceptualized as children and focuses on the moments when they became subjects, speaking their own adult status into being.  Poetic and political representation meet in the figure of the child on the cusp of adulthood – the grown boy still playing the woman’s part on stage, the young girl performing as The Lady in Milton’s Maske, the newly-created Adam and Eve making their way through the wider world at the conclusion of Paradise Lost.

            As those examples make clear, the poet, pedagogue, and polemicist John Milton is a pivotal figure in this study. “Shall we never grow old enough,” he asked in one of his final political tracts, “to be wise?”  It is a typical expression of Milton’s perpetual anxieties about his own maturity and that of the British people, and this book draws broadly from his poetry and prose to parallel Milton’s own development from budding poet to national tutor with the troubled birth and growth of consent in the English polity. At the same time, I show how such development looks back to and arises out of models of childhood staged by Jonson, Shakespeare, the humanists, and the antitheatrical critics who attacked them. For these writers, to speak as a child may simply mean to speak nonsense or to parrot others, but it may also enable one to channel something more powerful than oneself.

Status of the Manuscript

            The completed manuscript is approximately 90,000 words, including endnotes, and is ready to be reviewed by the press upon request. A version of the first chapter, “Coming of Age on Stage” is forthcoming in English Literary History (ELH) and a version of the third chapter “‘Perplex’t Paths: Youth and Authority in Milton’s Work,” was published in the Summer 2009 issue of Renaissance Quarterly.  I do not plan to publish additional chapters.  As a tenure-track professor at the University of Iowa I have ample time to devote to revisions, and as a former writer for TIME magazine I am experienced and efficient at working through the editorial process.

Readership

            Childish Things will appeal broadly to students and scholars of early modern English literature, drama, and history.  In a recent volume of Renaissance Quarterly the historian Margaret King assessed the existing histories of childhood and noted the need for work that would address “the demarcations made on the spectrum from conception to maturity.”  Problem Children helps fill that void.  The book’s argumentative spine, tracking the development and definition of consent, will also engage intellectual historians and scholars of the Civil War and legal historians, while its theoretical engagement with Hobbes, Hanna F. Pitkin, Philip Pettit, and John Rawls, will be of interest to students of political philosophy.  Shakespeareans and students of the theatre will attend to the new research on child actors, which significantly alters our understanding of the seventeenth-century stage.  Finally, with three chapters on John Milton’s poetry and prose, I expect the book to find a particular audience among Milton scholars and be reviewed in journals like Milton Studies and Milton Quarterly.

Related Works

            Michael Witmore’s Pretty Creatures (2007) and Edel Lamb’s Performing Childhood (2008) have recently developed the ground Leah Marcus broke with Childhood and Cultural Despair (1978). These books focus on the literary representation and aesthetics of very young children and neonates, establishing the child as central to early-modern poetics.  None, however, explores the strange territory at the outer bounds of childhood, and perhaps for that reason no other literary study develops the relationship between the poetics of childhood and the question of consent. Likewise, promising works like Su Fang Ng’s Literature and the Politics of Family (2007) have focused on patriarchal and anti-patriarchal metaphors with an eye to gender and hierarchy, but without attending to children and their conceptual link to issues of mimesis and voice. Likewise, individual authors in my study, especially Milton, have been richly contextualized in terms of their revolutionary moment in works like David Norbrook’s Writing the English Republic (1999) and David Loewenstein’s Representing Revolution in Milton and His Contemporaries (2007).  But it is safe to say that none of these works have considered the politics of childhood.  Although Holly Brewer’s legal history, By Birth or Consent (2008), focuses largely on the American context and does not include literary analysis, it shows that such a consideration is due.  Childish Things unites discussions of the poetics and politics of youth.  It does not simply use poetry and drama to illuminate social movements or testify to a broader discursive moment, but argues that children in form a nexus between poetry and politics, a singular locus for poetry’s disciplinary and transformative power.

Contents

Introduction

            “Childhood,” wrote Henry Cuffe in a hugely popular text of 1607, “is the first part and age of a man’s life, wherein their generation and growth is perfected, and this lasteth (for the most part) untill wee be five and twenty.”  Cuffe draws on the best authorities, but his parenthesis reflects a fundamental ambiguity about the boundaries of childhood shared across the legal, religious, and educational writings examined in this introduction.  Although they often bore full adult responsibilities, no amount of good behavior, maturity, or intelligence could guarantee adult status to children in their teens, twenties, and even thirties.  One trespass, however, could do the job instantly. The legal principle of “malitia supplet aetatem,” or malice supplies the age, removed the uncertainty, allowing even the youngest children to be executed as adults if they, like Adam and Eve, possessed the knowledge of good and evil.  My introduction traces the overlapping political, religious, and poetic concerns that make malitia supplet aetatem a fundamental pattern in early modern culture from Erasmus to Locke.  As individuals enter adult society, they reenact man’s fall with each generation, compromising their newfound voices.  The book’s recurring dilemma is the struggle to escape that double bind, to seize the ability to speak without seizing the inheritance of sin.

Chapter 1: Coming of Age on Stage: Jonson’s Epicoene and the Politics of Childhood in Early Stuart England

            The same qualities that made the child incapable of rational consent made him the ultimate exemplar of poetic response, and Chapter 1 explores the implications of this dynamic in Epicoene, a play that held its popularity both before the revolution and after the restoration.  Discussions of children’s theatre companies have reached a consensus view that the plays’ aesthetic power derived in some part from the boy actors’ diminutive size – an estrangement effect noted by Michael Witmore, Peter Stallybrass, Michael Shapiro, and others.  But my research shows that by the time James I took the throne, the actors in London’s children’s theatre companies were often fully grown men performing as children, and in Jonson’s play we can see how their liminality facilitated Stuart theatre’s exploration of the Jacobean subject’s vexed political status.

            As grown men performed childhood on stage, they testified to theatre’s disciplinary power even as they enacted a fictional freedom not available outside the theater walls. The young man dressed as the titular “silent woman” of Jonson’s play emblematizes this predicament perfectly: he speaks loudly and constantly as long as he performs his female role, lapsing into true silence only when he is finally revealed as a mature but infantilized man and the play ends.  At a time when James countered parliamentary unrest by adopting and expanding the rhetoric of the firm but benevolent father-king, works like Jonson’s asked whether it was possible, or even desirable, to leave childish things behind.

Chapter 2: Minors No Senators: Children, Literature and the Problem of Consent

            In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries it was surprisingly common for children under the age of majority to serve in Parliament, where they illuminated in stark relief the same crisis of agency dramatized in plays like Epicoene.  In this rarefied space, an infant could legislate for the nation, although outside of Parliament he had no legal authority to speak for himself, an irony the MP for Lichfield, Richard Weston highlighted when he complained “it is not fit, that they should make Laws for the Kingdom, who are not liable to the law.”    This chapter shows that for many, like the self-described “scourge” of stage plays William Prynne, such facts revealed disturbing similarities between dramatic and political representation in a country poised between tyranny and liberty.  In Minors No Senators, a tract published both early in the Civil War and at the Restoration, Prynne attacked child MPs with strikingly anti-theatrical language that illuminates the broader debate over education, poetry, and politics.  Theoretically, the child’s ability to channel the voices of others might offer a vehicle for the people’s will, but the practical effect of using Parliament as a finishing school for elites also indicated the disciplinary and symbolic purpose of England’s chief representative body.        Accordingly, as the principal of representation became central to discussions of English governance, the presence of children on the public stages of Parliament and playhouse forced a fundamental question:  did the type of representation embodied by the mimetic child demonstrate a failure of agency and consent, or did it indicate of a kind of representation that could operate successfully in the absence of consent? This is not just a political question that can be illuminated by literature, with poets and playwrights shedding light on their culture’s attempts to conceptualize the basis of obligation.  Instead, it is a fundamental crux that troubles contemporary claims for poesy’s shaping power and forms a recurring theme in the works of John Milton and his contemporaries in the following chapters.

Chapter 3: ‘Perplex’t Paths’: Youth and Authority in Milton’s Early Work

           

            Not all reformers attempted to sever the link between poetic and political representation.  The kind of authoritative consent Prynne envisioned was problematic, in part, because the period’s broad conceptualization of childhood made it difficult to explain when youths became properly adult.  Prynne dodged the question by declaring that legislators should be “Old Men” of at least fifty. But Milton was never one to step lightly away from a limen, and in early works like Comus he takes up the question of how children on the cusp of adulthood become free individuals with the authority to shape their own destinies. In works that prefigure his educational tracts and play a performative role in his own maturation, Milton suggests that only a daring engagement of the child’s passionate and sensuous nature allows a powerful, adult voice to emerge. 

            This is a peculiarly poetic process, immersing the child in a world of delights that she echoes, resists, and transforms; as the voice becomes authoritative, the human will comes into its own.  This proleptic moment, in which voice outstrips the will, generates the central anxiety in Milton’s early works. The youth who speaks before gaining the right to judge his own words may echo the wrong things, recognizing the malice of his will only after innocence cannot be recalled.   As I demonstrate this dynamic in early works like Ad Patrem, Sonnet 7, and Comus, I also address a lacuna in Milton studies. Recent revisionary biographical work by Gordon Campbell and Thomas Corns has suggested that Milton began his career as a conservative with high-church leanings, embracing “Laudian Arminianism and Laudian style” before gradually becoming radicalized.  But until Childish Things we have had no clear discussion of the role Milton’s poetry itself played in this developmental process, as a young author found his voice through a process that generated his later radicalism.

Chapter 4: ‘Children of Reviving Libertie’: The Radical Politics of the Well-Disciplined Child

            Milton’s career usefully complicates the dominant account of Renaissance humanist education as a disciplinary, conformist force popularized by scholars like Lisa Jardine, Anthony Grafton, and Richard Halpern.  This chapter begins by exploring the ways that Milton, Comenius, and other mid-century reformers adapted humanist pedagogical theories and concepts of childhood to revolutionary use.  Both Comenius and Milton develop the humanistic goal of willing submission into a radical discipline, but while Comenius attempts to purge his program of the poetic error that had long troubled humanist pedagogues, Milton insists that these dark materials are the very stuff of virtue.  Milton’s singular departure from the pedagogical tradition drives not only Of Education, but also polemical works including Eikonoklastes, Areopagitica, The Readie and Easie Way, and his epic First and Second Defense of the English People.  

            In such works, he draws on metaphors of childhood and wardship as he encourages his countrymen to prove that their liberty is not, as he puts it in the Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, merely “a ridiculous and painted freedom, fit to coz’n babies.” Milton describes a people who lack a voice but who possess a radical capacity for growth and change, and a more complete understanding of his pedagogical model forces a reassessment of his infamous elitism.  Milton certainly believes that the nation in wardship needs “a potent tutor, an overseer, a faithful and courageous superintendent of your affairs.”  But whether he sets himself or Cromwell up in this guardian position, he clearly intends it to be temporary, and I conclude by arguing that his prose works both describe and constitute a poetic education that can make the people “fittest to chuse” for themselves. The phrase is taken from The Readie and Easie Way, written on the eve of Restoration when Milton’s estimation of the people’s actual readiness is at its nadir. Even here, however, Milton continues to suggest that his own words may raise them up as “children of reviving libertie.”

Chapter 5: ‘Something of Gratitude’: Hobbes’ Prodigal Fictions

            While Milton employs concepts of childhood and development to construct a model of political change, Hobbes uses the child’s vacated agency as the model subjectivity for a system of political stasis.  Almost no critical attention has been paid to the role of children in Hobbes’s system, although in Leviathan and elsewhere the philosopher makes it clear that “the Child’s consent” to receive nourishment from its mother precedes all other social agreements.  How and when does the child demonstrate this consent?  Such questions go to the heart of mid-century debates over obligation and whether social relations derive from consent and contract or altruism and patronage. 

            Critical neglect of Hobbes’ children started early.  In De Cive, Hobbes suggests that to understand how contract operates in the state of nature we should “consider men as though they were suddenly sprung from the earth (like mushrooms) as adults right now.” Beginning from such a position, Hobbes can explain with almost mathematical precision how obligation arises from conquest and contract as men make rational choices to preserve themselves.  But children lack a fully developed rational faculty, and both Royalist and Republican critics attacked Hobbes for eliding them from his account.  Surely their obligation to parents demonstrated the principal role of love, nurture, and lineage in the state? I argue that Hobbes developed his answer over the course of his career, fundamentally altering his definitions of “reason” and “choice” as he reconfigures parental nurture and filial gratitude as a contractual exchange.  Mimetic and irrational, the child who can become obligated through no rational decision or act becomes a perfect figure for theorizing the obligation of the masses of men who never exercise a real voice in the political system to which they owe allegiance.

Chapter 6: ‘Unexperienc’t Thought’: Filial Affect and Education in England

            Through Satan, Milton depicts the failure of the Hobbesian psychology of contract and of the static worldview it requires; Satan attempts to elide filial ties by proposing that the angels may be “self-begot,” and when he finally does acknowledge the Father’s gifts he can only experience gratitude as debt, love as a system of exchange.  I argue that Adam and Eve demonstrate Milton’s alternative, their experience of obligation drawn from humanistic conceptions of childhood and the poet’s own radical pedagogy.  This final chapter not only offers a new way of reading Paradise Lost in the context of the many contemporary works depicting Adam and Eve as children, but also refigures our notion of the poem’s notorious disciplinary and hierarchical tendencies. 

            Paradise Lost has earned a reputation for bullying, from Stanley Fish’s depiction of the poem as a hectoring schoolmaster to Mary Nyquist’s influential argument that it enacts a form of female subjectivity that will be endlessly reiterated in future novels where heroines learn “the value of submitting desire to the paternal law” (123). But Milton leverages notions of childhood and familial nurture to elucidate forms of obligation without subjection, suggesting that a society of truly paradisal freedom might be constructed on the filial principal of fealty to God’s image written on the heart.  The difference from Nyquist’s model is subtle but essential, as Milton himself recognized as early as The Reason of Church Government, where he argued that God is no “schoolmaster of perishable rites, but a most indulgent father governing his Church as a family of sons in their discreet age.” Paradise Lost depicts and enacts such governance, an education via echoes and mirrors that serves as a revolutionary resource and a path to adult voice.  As Adam and Eve wander out of Eden with the world all before them Milton suggests that, for God’s children, this education is never complete.

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