This text studies the poetry and polemics of early modern writer Andrew Marvell. It situates Marvell and his writings within the patronage networks and political upheavals of mid-17th century England.
The Oxford Handbook of Andrew Marvell is the most comprehensive and informative collection of essays ever assembled dealing with the life and writings of the poet and politician Andrew Marvell (1621-78). Like his friend and colleague John Milton, Marvell is now seen as a dominant figure in the literary landscape of the mid-seventeenth century, producing a stunning oeuvre of poetry and prose either side of the Restoration. In the 1640s and 1650s he was the author of hypercanonical lyrics like 'To His Coy Mistress' and 'The Garden' as well as three epoch-defining poems about Oliver Cromwell. After 1660 he virtually invented the verse genre of state satire as well as becoming the most influential prose satirist of the day - in the process forging a long-lived reputation as an incorruptible patriot. Although Marvell himself was an intensely private and self-contained character, whose literary, religious, and political commitments are notoriously difficult to discern, the interdisciplinary contributions by an array of experts in the fields of seventeenth-century literature, history, and politics gathered together in the Handbook constitute a decisive step forward in our understanding of him. They offer a fully-rounded account of his life and writings, individual readings of his key works, considerations of his relations with his major contemporaries, and surveys of his rich and varied afterlives. Informed by the wealth of editorial and biographical work on Marvell that has been produced in the last twenty years, the volume is both a conspectus of the state of the art in Marvell studies and the springboard for future research.
Gale Researcher Guide for: Andrew Marvell: Poet, Polemicist, Politician is selected from Gale's academic platform Gale Researcher. These study guides provide peer-reviewed articles that allow students early success in finding scholarly materials and to gain the confidence and vocabulary needed to pursue deeper research.
This monograph studies how, across the Folio of 1681, Marvell's poems engage not merely with different kinds of loss and aspiration, but with experiences of both that were, in mid-seventeenth-century England, disturbingly new and unfamiliar. It particularly examines Marvell's preoccupation with the search for home, and with redefining the homeland, in times of civil upheaval. In doing so it traces his progression from being a poet who plays sophisticatedly with received myth to being one who is a national mythmaker in rivalry with his poetic contemporaries such as Waller and Davenant. Although focusing primarily on poems in the Folio of 1681, this book considers those poems in relation to others from the Marvell canon, including the Latin poems and the satires from the reign of Charles II. It closely considers them as well in relation to verse by poets from the classical past and the European, especially English, present.
This book provides an accessible account of the poet and politician Andrew Marvell’s life (1621-1678) and of the great events which found reflection in his work and in which he and his writings eventually played a part. At the same time, considerable space is afforded to reflecting deeply on the modes and meanings of Marvell’s art, redressing the balance of recent biography and criticism which has tended to dwell on the public and political aspects of this literary life at the expense of lyric invention and lyric possibility. Moving beyond the familiar terms of imitation and influence, the book aims at reconstructing an embodied history of reading and writing, acts undertaken within a series of complex physical and social environments, from the Hull Charterhouse to the coffee houses and print shops of Restoration London. Care has been taken to cover the whole of Marvell’s career, in verse and prose, even as the book places the lyric achievement at the centre of its vision.
Texts and Readers in the Age of Marvell offers fresh perspectives from leading and emerging scholars on seventeenth-century British literature, with a focus on the surprising ways that texts interacted with writers and readers at specific cultural moments.
Overshadowed in the popular imagination by the figure of Oliver Cromwell, historians are increasingly coming to recognize the importance of Thomas Fairfax, 3rd Lord Fairfax of Cameron, in shaping the momentous events of mid-seventeenth-century Britain. As both a military and political figure he played a central role in first defeating Charles I and then later supporting the restoration of his son in 1660. England’s Fortress shines new light on this significant yet surprisingly understudied figure through a selection of essays addressing a wide range of topics, from military history to poetry. Divided into two sections, the volume reflects key aspects of Fairfax’s life and career which are, nevertheless, as interconnecting as they are discrete: Fairfax the soldier and statesman, and Fairfax the husband, horseman and scholar. This fresh account of Fairfax’s reputations and legacy questions assumptions about neatly demarcated seventeenth-century chronological, geographic and cultural boundaries. What emerges is a man who subverts as much as he reinforces assumed characteristics of martial invincibility, political disengagement and literary dilettantism.
Recent literary criticism, along with academic culture at large, has stressed collaboration as essential to textual creation and sociability as a literary and academic virtue. Solitude and Speechlessness proposes an alternative understanding of writing with a complementary mode of reading: literary engagement, it suggests, is the meeting of strangers, each in a state of isolation. The Renaissance authors discussed in this study did not necessarily work alone or without collaborators, but they were uncertain who would read their writings and whether those readers would understand them. These concerns are represented in their work through tropes, images, and characterizations of isolation. The figure of the isolated, misunderstood, or misjudged poet is a preoccupation that relies on imagining the lives of wandering and complaining youths, eloquent melancholics, exemplary hermits, homeless orphans, and retiring stoics; such figures acknowledge the isolation in literary experience. As a response to this isolation of literary connection, Solitude and Speechlessness proposes an interpretive mode it defines as strange reading: a reading that merges comprehension with indeterminacy and the imaginative work of interpretation with the recognition of historical difference.
Milton criticism often treats the poet as if he were the last of the Renaissance poets or a visionary prophet who remained misunderstood until he was read by the Romantics. At the same time, literary histories of the period often invoke a Long Eighteenth Century that reaches its climax with the French Revolution or the Reform Bill of 1832. What gets overlooked in such accounts is the rich story of Milton's relationship to his contemporaries and early eighteenth-century heirs. The essays in this collection demonstrate that some of Milton's earliest readers were more perceptive than Romantic and twentieth-century interpreters. The translations, editions, and commentaries produced by early eighteenth century men of letters emerge as the seedbed of modern criticism and the term 'neoclassical' is itself unmasked as an inadequate characterization of the literary criticism and poetry of the period—a period that could brilliantly define a Miltonic sublime, even as it supported and described all the varieties of parody and domestication found in the mock epic and the novel. These essays, which are written by a team of leading Miltonists and scholars of the Restoration and eighteenth century, cover a range of topics—from Milton's early editors and translators to his first theatrical producers; from Miltonic similes in Pope's Iliad to Miltonic echoes in Austen's Pride and Prejudice; from marriage, to slavery, to republicanism, to the heresy of Arianism. What they share in common is a conviction that the early eighteenth century understood Milton and that the Long Restoration cannot be understood without him.
Moments of royal succession, which punctuate 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. Benefitting 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.