Research on the Secrecy and Genres in the Seventeenth-Century Royalist Literature in England

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The points made through this research are the following:1.While the popular genres that thrived in cheap-print media (song, ballad, litany etc.) rarely show highly cryptic representations, the aristocratic genres that had a more limited readership (love poetry, pastoral, meditative or religious poetry etc.) are often utilized as camouflage or codes to impart secret messages.2.While such genres as love poetry and religious poetry are rather simply used for camouflage, pastoral has a more direct bearing on generating cryptic meanings in terms of the cultural and historical codes it contains. Pastoral also seems to have enabled the limited readership to hold on to their cultural and political identity allowing them to share such aristocratic codes.3.The secrecy of the royalist literature seems to have been part of the royalist enterprise to maintain their cultural and social authority by mystifying, and claiming to have privileged access to, divine substance such as God and King understood as the ultimate source of their authority.4.To show how genres are used for camouflage, I focused on Henry Vaughan's "The World" and argued that it is a highly genre-conscious enterprise that skillfully utilizes the genre of religious poetry usually understood as a poet's private prayer to criticize, in actuality, the speaker himself who is implicitly characterized as a Puritan preacher.5.Through this research I greatly enlarged my knowledge of genre theories in general, histories and conventions of respective genres, and some of the contemporary prose genres.For future projects, I am planning to focus on more theoretical issues concerning literary genres.