A sense of place: historicism, whither wilt?

In the last decade, the historicism that had become so familiar to us by the turn of the century has increasingly come under challenge, revised, reconsidered and often rejected from a number of different directions. This chapter explores recent innovations in and challenges to understanding the relationship between text and context, including the new formalism, historical phenomenology, and cognitive poetics. Of particular interest here are the innovations and difficulties that can come with attempting an historicism grounded in local affects and perceptions, with examples drawn from Thomas Browne and W. G. Sebald, among others. In the process, D’Addario considers the appeal of alternative literary histories, the difficulties of periodisation, and the legacies of New Historicism. The chapter ends with a gesture to embracing studies that admit their speculative nature, that embrace and accept their historicism as novel re-imaginings of the past.

The European Marvell

This chapter investigates Marvell’s poetry in the context of three aspects of seventeenth-century European poetry and in light of Marvell’s own connections with the continental Europe of his lifetime, and his interest in European literature in Latin and the vernacular languages. The chapter argues that our understanding of Marvell is far better served by regarding his enterprises as poet, prose writer, and political agent as a part of the particular literary power relationships and the political role of literature that pertained in continental Europe, in many ways differing from English situations. Topics discussed include the patronage and veneration of European poets, the cross-lingual arenas of poetic contest in times of international conflict, and the broader significance of the appeal to Marvell of European poetry, exemplified in the case of the Spanish poet Luis de Góngora y Argote.

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

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.

On behalf of the Age of Andrew Marvell?

Can a literary age belong to a writer who made a secret of his poems and whose pamphlets were veiled in anonymity? If so, then the middle decades of the seventeenth might be called the age of Andrew Marvell, perhaps not in the way that the opening of this century was the Age of Shakespeare or that its late decades were John Dryden’s own, but a case might be made for the hidden life of the poet as the very emblem of those decades, of the Age of Andrew Marvell. The afterword to Texts and Readers explores this enigmatic, this emblematic possibility.

Waller, Tasso, and Marvell’s Last Instructions to a Painter

This chapter examines a passage in Marvell’s Last Instructions to a Painter concerned with the death of Archibald Douglas. While the passage might, considered in isolation, appear to be arbitrarily dilated to allow Marvell to indulge some of his imaginative and literary preoccupations, study of its textual underpinnings suggests that it was prompted and shaped by literary and political occasions coalescing around the poetry and politics of Edmund Waller. The chapter argues that the passage revises and corrects Waller’s recasting of Tasso’s version of a Virgilian topos, erasing the romance motivations that, in earlier versions, animate the scene in favour of epic austerity. It thus illuminates the connection between literary and political antagonisms in the Restoration, making clear not only the degree to which arguments about policy were conducted through literary texts, but also the extent to which poetic genre could itself be constitutive of court ideology and national policy.

‘Armed winter, and inverted day’: the politics of cold in Dryden and Purcell’s King Arthur

Led by the perspectives of eco-criticism and climate science, this chapter approaches King Arthur through its famous masque, the Frost Scene, which the evil Saxon wizard Osmond conjures in the war between pagan Saxons and Arthur’s Christian Britons. The masque crystallises a set of moral, cultural, and political associations hitherto unexplored in Dryden’s work around cold, ice, winter, and the far North in opposition to the warmth of temperate zones and of mercy. At the end of a century of severe winters and increasing interest in the nature of cold, and performed while William III led England to war in Europe, King Arthur demonises cold and war, characterising obliquely the national climate of war as an unnatural inversion of what Dryden had earlier celebrated as his former patron Charles II’s warmly civilising rule as ‘Royal Husbandman’. Not Arthur’s swordplay but the spirit Philidel’s discriminating vision and capacity for tender pity at human suffering represent the useful heroism in an ‘armed winter’.

Marvell’s personal elegy? Rewriting Shakespeare in A Poem upon the Death of O. C.

‘I saw him dead’ is probably the best-known line in Marvell’s elegy for Cromwell, and most readings advance it as proof of the poem’s personal nature. The poet apparently saw the corpse of the Lord Protector in September 1658. Upon further inspection, however, Marvell’s claim proves less personal and more mediated and ironic than we have thought, directly quoting Hal’s startled response to Falstaff’s rising from the dead in Henry IV, Part 1. Not only does Marvell’s echo of Shakespeare rehearse someone else’s experience (Hal’s stunned mixture of grief, relief, and exasperation at Falstaff’s revival); it also drags along the whole tangle of Hal’s relationships to Falstaff and his father, as both second selves and others. Among the grief and admiration for Cromwell lurks a resentment of being in his shadow, of being forever a servant and client to some great man, even in death.

Extraordinarily ordinary: Nehemiah Wallington’s experimental method

The nature of note-taking is a renewed subject of scholarly inquiry – whether in service of humanistic eloquence, Baconian scientific practice, an aid to memory, or an early stage of writing. Messy notebooks give us access to a range of organisational strategies for managing knowledge, many of them improvisational, many evolving out of older humanistic practices. This chapter analyses the surviving evidence of Nehemiah Wallington’s four decades of devotional note-taking. Wallington exemplifies the godly practices of non-elite, lay cultures, but he does so as both an early adopter and a sustained practitioner. Two elements of his observational method emerge in ‘An Extract of severall passages in my life’: a juxtaposition of organizational schemes – one chronological, the other topical – and a habitual commitment to the bound blank book. Collectively and over time, his books constitute a memory palace – with size and colour of covers and pages operating mnemonically. By attending to such texts, we can also achieve a fuller understanding of early modern reading and writing practices.

‘Small portals’: Marvell’s Horatian Ode, print culture, and literary history

In recent decades, literary critics have explored the arena of early modern print culture with increasing enthusiasm. Scholars have identified a wealth of allusions to wider print culture in canonical texts, and begun to map a stratum of public language, the language of pamphlets, newspapers and political discourse, with which literature traffics, picks up and discards in its periods. Sometimes this has been framed in terms of putting literature in a modified version of a Habermasian ‘public sphere’. Less attention has been paid to the – surely necessary and complementary – processes of ‘separation’ and ‘transformation’, if those are the right words. We know that literary texts borrow, appropriate, refashion these other texts, and we know that literary texts sometimes seek to rise above the fray by professing a disdain for the demotic, but how do these texts manage practically to maintain a distance while absorbing? Focusing on Marvell’s great Horatian Ode, the present chapter seeks to illuminate the interconnections between the languages of literature, political argument and journalism. In so doing, it begins to give a new account of the separation between print culture and literary writing, of the valves that govern the movement of words and their aesthetic potential.

Impractical criticism: close reading and the contingencies of history

Over the last seventy years, the discipline of English literature has been marked by an unnecessary and largely counterproductive tension between aesthetics and history. For many politically oriented critics, aesthetics was either uninteresting or implicated in the elite practices they deliberately opposed. And for those who focused on aesthetics, history frequently seemed like a distraction from what made the work of art a special kind of utterance, separate from other modes of language. This chapter revisits some of the signal literary engagements in the latter half of the long twentieth century, in order to consider what has been accomplished, what we have left out, and where we may be going next. With reference to writers from Donne and Herbert to John Milton, the chapter suggests, finally, that our analyses have too frequently ignored the decidedly impractical pleasure that emerges from literary activity, and argues that by bringing our own pleasure out of the closet, we can begin to restore to literary criticism some of the visceral thrill that drew us to it in the first place.