Texts and readers in the Age of Marvell

2018 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
John Milton ◽  
British Literature ◽  
John Dryden ◽  
Andrew Marvell ◽  
New Formalism ◽  
Postgraduate Students ◽  
Fine Grained ◽  
Literature Culture

Texts and Readers in the Age of Marvell offers fresh perspectives from leading and emerging scholars of seventeenth-century British literature, focusing on the surprising ways that texts interacted with writers and readers at precise cultural moments. With particular interest in how texts entered the seventeenth-century public world, some of these essays emphasise the variety of motivations – from generic distaste to personal frustration – that explain how ideology and form fuse together in various works. Others offer fine-grained and multi-sided contextualisations of familiar texts and cruxes. With an eye to the elusive and complicated Andrew Marvell as tutelary figure of the age, the contributors provide novel readings of a range of seventeenth-century authors, often foregrounding the complexities these writers faced as the remarkable events of the century moved swiftly around them. The essays make important contributions, both methodological and critical, to the field of early modern studies and include examinations of prominent seventeenth-century figures such as John Milton, Andrew Marvell, John Dryden, and Edmund Waller. New work appears here by Nigel Smith and Michael McKeon on Marvell, Michael Schoenfeldt on new formalism, Derek Hirst on child abuse in the seventeenth century, and Joad Raymond on print politics. Because of their relevance to contemporary critical debates, the studies here will be of interest to postgraduate students and scholars working on seventeenth-century British literature, culture, and history.

Introduction: remapping early modern literature

2018 ◽  
pp. 1-37
Author(s):  
Matthew C. Augustine
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
John Milton ◽  
Early Modern Literature ◽  
John Dryden ◽  
Modern Literature ◽  
High Definition ◽  
Andrew Marvell ◽  
History Of ◽  
Century Literature

The argument of this book follows two main themes: the first has to do with periodicity; the second with politics, especially as a framework within which to view seventeenth-century literature. This chapter maps the disciplinary paradigms which have long produced a view of the seventeenth century saturated by high-definition contrasts: between the earlier and later Stuart periods, but also between factions and ideologies. It then asks what it would look like to write the history of seventeenth-century literature anew, to tell a story about imaginative and polemical writing in this age that remained open to accident and unevenness, to contradiction and uncertainty. Giving illustrative consideration to John Dryden, Andrew Marvell, and John Milton, the chapter begins to suggest some new ways of conceiving how these writers might relate to one other and to the politics and aesthetics of a long seventeenth century.

Stuart Succession Literature

2018 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
British Literature ◽  
The Political ◽  
Literature And Politics ◽  
Distinct Category ◽  
Political Structures ◽  
Distinguished Group ◽  
Modern British Literature

Moments of royal succession, which punctuated the Stuart era (1603–1714), occasioned outpourings of literature. Writers, including most of the major figures of the seventeenth century from Jonson, Daniel, and Donne to Marvell, Dryden, and Behn, seized upon these occasions to mark the transition of power; to reflect upon the political structures and values of their nation; and to present themselves as authors worthy of patronage and recognition. This volume of essays explores this important category of early modern writing. It contends that succession literature warrants attention as a distinct category: appreciated by contemporaries, acknowledged by a number of scholars, but never investigated in a coherent and methodical manner, it helped to shape political reputations and values across the period. Benefiting from the unique database of such writing generated by the AHRC-funded Stuart Successions Project, the volume brings together a distinguished group of authors to address a subject which is of wide and growing interest to students both of history and of literature. It illuminates the relation between literature and politics in this pivotal century of English political and cultural history. Interdisciplinary in scope, the volume will be indispensable to scholars of early modern British literature and history as well as undergraduates and postgraduates in both fields.

“Would India had beene never knowne”

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kristina Bross
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Historical Fiction ◽  
John Dryden ◽  
Archival Material ◽  
East Indies ◽  
Representations Of Women

This chapter analyzes two representations of women based on the print record of a 1623 incident in which English traders were tortured and killed by their Dutch rivals on the island of Amboyna in the East Indies. William Sanderson imagined the reaction of one “Amboyna widow” in a pair of publications in the 1650s, and John Dryden created characters for his 1673 play Amboyna based on reports published years earlier. If we consider these works as early modern examples of historical fiction we can see that the writers construct the role of colonial women in the seventeenth-century English imagination as a symbol of the righteousness of English imperial actions and colonizing claims. Taken together, the “wives’ tales” of this chapter suggest that the reach of the East India Companies—both English and Dutch—and of their governments into people’s lives was powerful. Yet the stories of these women suggested by their traces in the archives indicate the limits of that power and the limits of the archival function to control the stories of marginalized people. Dryden’s play in particular points readers back to the archives and suggests what they tell us (or fail to tell us) about the subjects of the English global fantasies inscribed in the literature and other print records of the seventeenth century. The coda pieces together contextual and archival material to speculate on the experiences of a woman, held as a slave by the Dutch, who was intimately connected to the Amboyna incident.

Understanding experience: subjectivity, sex, and suffering in early modern England

2018 ◽  
pp. 113-130
Author(s):  
Derek Hirst
Keyword(s):  
Child Abuse ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Sexual Identity ◽  
Early Modern England ◽  
Andrew Marvell

It comes as little surprise that Andrew Marvell in his verse should have endangered as well as touched with eros the figure of the child, though the potential implications often escape attention. We tell ourselves that our attitudes to what we call child abuse are distinctively modern, but how different might early modern imaginings have been? To address that unsettling question, this chapter considers seventeenth-century applications of familiar categories like ‘child’ and ‘abuse’. Focusing on the position of the tutor – well known of course to Marvell – and on passages in the schoolroom, it finds in print controversy signs of early modern awareness of what seemed then, as now, an unmistakably sexualised violence, with its predatory gratifications and its shame. The conclusion, that some contemporaries could apprehend and even articulate not just suffering but even subjectivity, can only further perplex the question of Marvell’s sexual identity and the meaning for him of the child.

Passions

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Blair Hoxby
Keyword(s):  
William Shakespeare ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
John Milton ◽  
John Dryden ◽  
Early Modern Theatre

This chapter examines the theory of the passions in relation to early modern theatre. It first considers the reception of Aristotle’sPoeticsand particularly how the writings of ancient critics located the essence of tragedy in the passions that it imitated and aroused. It then turns to John Dryden and John Milton, who both regarded the passions, not ‘character’, as the most important objects of imitation, and reconstructs a critical and poetic world in which the ‘personation’ of passion was thought to be essential to the formal capacities of theatre and the source of the profound collective experiences it made possible. It also explores the passions in dramatic poetry and on stage, along with the emergence of character as a more important unit of dramatic meaning than passion. The chapter concludes by suggesting that William Shakespeare also sought to represent and sway the passions, and therefore did not lie outside the mainstream of early modern theatre.

scholarly journals An Old Author in the New World: Terence, Samuel Melyen, and the Boston Latin School c. 1700

2019 ◽  
Vol 92 (2) ◽  
pp. 263-292
Author(s):  
Theodore R. Delwiche
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
New World ◽  
School Building ◽  
Classical Education ◽  
Fine Grained

This article examines the fine-grained practice of a classical education at seventeenth-century Boston Latin School. Building off wider early modern European practices, schoolboy and schoolmaster in Boston adapted Roman authors like Terence and Cicero to both pious and practical ends.

Poetry as Optical Technology

2020 ◽  
pp. 13-39
Author(s):  
Erin Webster
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Mechanical Model ◽  
Moral Authority ◽  
John Dryden ◽  
Philosophical Tradition ◽  
Visual Theory ◽  
William Davenant ◽  
European Culture ◽  
The Impact

This chapter explores the impact of Johannes Kepler’s mechanical model of vision on early modern poetic theory. It begins with an overview of classical visual and optical theory as they relate to Plato’s and Aristotle’s descriptions of poetry as an image-making technology. At the same time, it explains how their poetic theories are in turn connected to a philosophical tradition that associates heightened visual capacity with spiritual insight and intellectual and moral authority. The chapter then moves into an exploration of how early modern poetic theorists both inherited and adapted this existing intellectual tradition in response to the optical and visual theory of the period. By comparing Philip Sidney’s Defence of Poetry (1595) and George Puttenham’s The Arte of English Poesie (1589)—two works that pre-date Kepler’s theory—to later, seventeenth-century works by William Davenant, Thomas Hobbes, and John Dryden, this chapter shows that the changing status of the image in seventeenth-century European culture resulted in a complementary alteration within theories of poetic representation.

THE COURTSHIP AND SINGLEHOOD OF ELIZABETH ISHAM, 1630–1634

2008 ◽  
Vol 51 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-25 ◽  
Author(s):  
ISAAC STEPHENS
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern England ◽  
John Dryden ◽  
Economic Aspects ◽  
Spiritual Autobiography ◽  
Marriage Formation

ABSTRACTScholars have long known of the proposed marriage in 1630 of John Dryden, grandson of Sir Erasmus Dryden, and Elizabeth Isham, eldest child of Sir John Isham. All knowledge of this proposed marriage came from correspondence revealing that, having reached a financial impasse, the two families aborted the proposed match. At first glance, such a case seems rather unremarkable, since similar stories abound of other contemporary families and in more detail. The Dryden–Isham match, however, takes on increased importance with the recent discovery of Elizabeth Isham's 60,000-word spiritual autobiography. Unlike the correspondence that mainly deals with the economic aspects of the match, Elizabeth's autobiography provides a more personal and emotional account, revealing the importance that familial love and honour played in the arrangement. In addition, the autobiography shows that the failed match caused Elizabeth to have a religious aversion to marriage, leading her to choose singlehood for the remainder of her life. Her experience forces scholars to recognize the significance that familial love, honour, and personal piety could have on marriage formation in the seventeenth century, and it illustrates the lasting impact that a failed match could have on a woman in early modern England.

Language Matters: ‘Counsel’ in Early Modern and Modern Medicine

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ian Sabroe ◽  
Phil Withington
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Scientific Revolution ◽  
Modern Medicine ◽  
Francis Bacon ◽  
Social Worlds ◽  
Founding Fathers ◽  
Human Understanding ◽  
Successful Scientist

Francis Bacon is famous today as one of the founding fathers of the so-called ‘scientific revolution’ of the seventeenth century. Although not an especially successful scientist himself, he was nevertheless the most eloquent and influential spokesperson for an approach to knowledge that promised to transform human understanding of both humanity and its relationship with the natural and social worlds. The central features of this approach, as they emerged in Bacon’s own writings and the work of his protégés and associates after 1605, are equally well known. They include the importance of experiment, observation, and a sceptical attitude towards inherited wisdom (from the ‘ancients’ in general and Aristotle in particular).

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