A Careful Longing
A Careful Longing

Author: Aaron Santesso

Publisher: University of Delaware Press

Published: 2006

Total Pages: 230

ISBN-13: 9780874139457

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This book examines the emergence of a new genre during the eighteenth century: the nostalgia poem. This genre is best understood by reconceiving the premises of nostalgia itself, examining it as first and foremost a mode of idealization rather than a longing for the past. From the poems that make up this genre, we have derived many of our modern ideas and images of nostalgia. In tracing the history of the nostalgia poem, this book also traces a pattern of tropic change, in which a new genre is built around tropes extracted from the dying genres. This new genre then begins producing its own tropes; in the case of the nostalgia poem, these include idealized school days and ruined villages. As these tropes become overly familiar, the nostalgia poem genre itself begins to fall apart. This book reevaluates poems ranging from Dryden's Hastings elegy to Crabbe's The Village, showing how works as varied as Gray's Eton College Ode, Macpherson's forged epics, and Goldsmith's The Deserted Village are all part of a doomed literary experiment - an experiment that has nevertheless determined the course of modern nostalgic thought.

Poetics of Loss
Poetics of Loss

Author: Katharina Lempe

Publisher: LIT Verlag Münster

Published: 2015

Total Pages: 249

ISBN-13: 3643906064

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With the removal of death from the public sphere, mourning has become a private matter. At the same time, particularly in poetry, the trend is reversed. An intensely elegiac quality and a focus on absence, death, and loss can be observed in contemporary Anglophone poetry. This study examines the poetry of Andrew Motion in the context of the contemporary elegy, a genre which is at a crossroads between the anti-consolatory refusal to mourn, the inability to move past grief, and the strong wish for redemption from grief. Motion's poetry, which mainly deals with preemptive attempts to cope with loss, can be seen as a typical example for the contemporary melancholy mood in poetry. (Series: Erlanger Studies of English and American Studies / Erlanger Studien zur Anglistik und Amerikanistik - Vol. 15) [Subject: Poetry, Death Studies, Literary Criticism]

Poetics of the Pillory
Poetics of the Pillory

Author: Thomas Keymer

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2019-10-24

Total Pages: 342

ISBN-13: 0191070912

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On the lapse of the Licensing Act in 1695, Thomas Macaulay wrote in his History of England, 'English literature was emancipated, and emancipated for ever, from the control of the government'. It's certainly true that the system of prior restraint enshrined in this Restoration measure was now at an end, at least for print. Yet the same cannot be said of government control, which came to operate instead by means of post-publication retribution, not pre-publication licensing, notably for the common-law offence of seditious libel. For many of the authors affected, from Defoe to Cobbett, this new regime was a greater constraint on expression than the old, not least for its alarming unpredictability, and for the spectacular punishment—the pillory—that was sometimes entailed. Yet we may also see the constraint as an energizing force. Throughout the eighteenth century and into the Romantic period, writers developed and refined ingenious techniques for communicating dissident or otherwise contentious meanings while rendering the meanings deniable. As a work of both history and criticism, this book traces the rise and fall of seditious libel prosecution, and with it the theatre of the pillory, while arguing that the period's characteristic forms of literary complexity—ambiguity, ellipsis, indirection, irony—may be traced to the persistence of censorship in the post-licensing world. The argument proceeds through case studies of major poets and prose writers including Dryden, Defoe, Pope, Fielding, Johnson, and Southey, and also calls attention to numerous little-known satires and libels across the extended period.

Poetry and Allegiance in the English Civil Wars
Poetry and Allegiance in the English Civil Wars

Author: Nicholas McDowell

Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA

Published: 2008-11-20

Total Pages: 306

ISBN-13: 0199278008

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This book explores the things which united, rather than divided, poets during the English Civil Wars, focusing less on conflicts between 'Cavaliers' and 'Roundheads' than on the friendships and shared literary enthusiasms of men of various political allegiance. Includes new readings of the early verse of John Milton and Andrew Marvell.

The Oxford Handbook of Andrew Marvell
The Oxford Handbook of Andrew Marvell

Author: Martin Dzelzainis

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2019-03-28

Total Pages: 845

ISBN-13: 0191055999

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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.

Andrew Marvell Chronology
Andrew Marvell Chronology

Author: N. Maltzahn

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2005-08-02

Total Pages: 329

ISBN-13: 0230505910

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This work provides a comprehensive account of the life and writings of Andrew Marvell (1621-78), as well as the reception of his work in the century after his death. A much-loved poet, a compelling controversialist, and once famous as a member of Parliament, Marvell's intersecting careers are here explored in detail. His biography is transformed with wide reference to print and manuscript sources, many of which are described for the first time in this useful resource for any student, historian, literary scholar or general reader interested in the life and works of this great writer.

The Oxford Handbook of Literature and the English Revolution
The Oxford Handbook of Literature and the English Revolution

Author: Laura Lunger Knoppers

Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA

Published: 2012-11-29

Total Pages: 744

ISBN-13: 0199560609

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This Handbook presents a comprehensive introduction and thirty-seven new analytical essays on the issues, contexts, and texts of the English Revolution. Offering textual, literary critical, historical, and methodological information, the volume exemplifies new and diverse approaches to revolutionary writing and maps out future avenues of research.