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1
1936-, Walker Keith, ed. John Dryden. Oxford [Oxfordshire]: Oxford University Press, 1987.
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1953-, Hammond Paul, and Hopkins David 1948-, eds. Dryden: Selected poems. Harlow: Pearson Longman, 2007.
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N, Zwicker Steven, and Bywaters David A, eds. John Dryden: Selected poems. London: Penguin, 2001.
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Virgil. Vergil's Aeneid ; and, Fourth ("messianic") eclogue: In the Dryden translation. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1989.
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Pikulik, I. I. Improving energy efficiency of paper machine dryer sections: Final level one report. Washington, D.C: U.S. Dept. of Energy, Office of Industrial Programs, 1988.
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West, John. Dryden and Enthusiasm. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198816409.001.0001.
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For John Dryden, enthusiasm was a crucial form of literary authority. It allowed writers to speak of supernatural or divine things. It signalled the intense emotions of an audience or reader that allowed them to share the writer’s visionary transport. Enthusiasm also carried disturbing political and religious registers. Referring to mistaken claims of divine inspiration, it was associated with the religious sects of the Civil Wars and Interregnum. In Dryden’s work, it characterizes religious dissenters whom he regarded as inheritors to the ideas of those mid-century radicals. For Dryden, enthusiasm was at a literary ideal and a threat to the stability of the state. Dryden and Enthusiasm is the first book-length account of the paradoxical place of enthusiasm in the work of one of the major writers of the seventeenth century. It charts the interaction of the different manifestations of enthusiasm throughout Dryden’s literary criticism, poetry, and drama, and against the changing religious and political contexts of Restoration England. Countering a view of Dryden as a poet of order and reason, the book argues that he was an enthusiastic writer who believed that imaginative literature could break into unearthly realms. Examining the surprising proximity of Dryden’s rhetoric of enthusiasm to that which he denigrated in his religious and political opponents, the book reimagines the interaction of literary practice and ideological allegiance in the aftermath of the Civil Wars.
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West, John. Enthusiasm and Political Crisis. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198816409.003.0003.
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This chapter examines how the Exclusion crisis of 1678–82 affected Dryden’s theorization of the role of enthusiasm in literature and drama. Dryden’s essays of the late 1670s seem to move back towards the rule of judgement, but his work from this period also tries to preserve some semblance of enthusiasm’s literary relevance. The chapter argues that this adjustment was informed by the partisan politics of the late ’70s and early ’80s. Initially, the chapter explores this through Dryden’s engagement with Shakespeare, before analysing his major political and religious poems of the period, Absalom and Achitophel (1681), The Medall (1682), and Religio Laici (1682), as well as the Whig responses to them that brandished Dryden a mere enthusiast. Dryden was working out how to preserve a version of enthusiasm denoting the strong passions amid a political culture where personal feeling seemed to be elevated as the sole guide of public judgement.
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West, John. Dryden’s Post-Revolutionary Theology of Providence. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198816409.003.0005.
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For Dryden, enthusiasm often signalled transcendence from the earthly and glimpsing the divine. The chapter examines the fate of this idea by tracing his late thinking about the relationship between providence and human action. The Hind and the Panther (1687) presents providence as mysteriously distant from humanity and inspiration as mediated through the Church. After the 1688 Revolution, such a view stood in contradistinction to the rhetoric of special providential intervention commonly used by Williamites. Dryden sometimes condemns this rhetoric as enthusiasm. His recurrent preoccupation in the 1690s is not militant Jacobitism, however, but learning to live in exile and suffering. The chapter argues that mystical Catholicism linked with Jansenism provides an intellectual context for this turn in Dryden’s thought. It reads this mysticism in Dryden’s late translations of Juvenal, Persius, Virgil, and Ovid which reflect on how contemplative reflection of God’s mysterious providence could help navigate a corrupt world.
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West, John. The Politics of the Fancy in Dryden’s Early Literary Criticism. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198816409.003.0002.
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This chapter examines the fancy in Dryden’s theorization of heroic drama from 1664 to 1677. In his early essays on the literary imagination, Dryden describes a symbiotic relationship between the fancy and the judgement. From around 1668 onwards, however, he begins to prioritize the fancy as a faculty that creates images of things from outside nature. The fancy facilitates a theory of representation in Dryden’s work that sought to go beyond the accurate portrayal of nature and to depict supernatural objects and provoke extreme emotion. This lends itself to his interest in the sublime, which the chapter reads in relation to Milton’s late poetry. At the same time, Anglican polemicists used the fancy as a term with which to attack fantastical beliefs in spiritual inspiration they believed were professed by religious dissenters. The chapter explores Dryden’s literary thought alongside the rhetoric of religious intolerance and arguments about toleration.
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Hammond, Paul. The Poems of John Dryden: Volume One. Routledge, 2014. http://dx.doi.org/10.4324/9781315836744.
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John, Dryden. The Poetical Works of John Dryden Part One. Kessinger Publishing, LLC, 2004.
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West, John. Introduction. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198816409.003.0001.
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The introduction outlines how enthusiasm has been neglected in Dryden criticism. There is a persistent view of Dryden as an ‘Augustan’ or ‘neo-classical’ writer preoccupied by reason and order in art and politics. The introduction situates the book in a critical counter-tradition that sees him as more interested in instability, disorder, and the otherworldly. Yet the critics who have seen Dryden in this way are often uninterested in the implications such literary characteristics have on our understanding of Dryden as a political writer. Ideas of what constitutes royalist, republican, or Whig poetics have not adequately considered what happens when a supposedly conservative writer like Dryden theorizes or practices a style more commonly linked with contemporaries of opposed political and religious views. The introduction sets out what enthusiasm meant to Dryden and the ways he navigated the dangerous connotations of divine inspiration in the Restoration.
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Hopkins, David, and Paul Hammond. The Poems of John Dryden, Volume IV: 1693-1696. Longman, 2000.
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The Poems of John Dryden, Volume 5: 1697-1700 (Longman Annotated English Poets). Longman, 2005.
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Braunmuller, A. R. Shakespeare’s Late Style. Edited by Jonathan Post. Oxford University Press, 2013. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199607747.013.0025.
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‘Shakespeare’s Late Style’ explores stylistic aspects of Shakespeare’s dramatic verse (and a little of the prose) in plays composed after Hamlet. It suggests that Dryden was among the first to recognize that Shakespeare’s style changed over time and seems to have thought that the style became less ‘pestered’ with ‘figurative expressions’ as the career advanced. Like most early commentators, however, Dryden left little detailed analysis to support his larger, often metaphorical, claims. The purpose of this chapter is to identify the features of Shakespeare’s style in the second half of his professional career, to explore the imaginative effect of those features, and to speculate on why these changes from his earlier plays might have occurred. One principal claim made in this chapter concerns the degree to which the dramatic verse is rooted in dramatic events and characters’ motivations and designs. Increasing abstraction in both thought and expression combine to create the distinctive quasi-allegorical qualities especially visible in the four or five plays last written by Shakespeare alone or in collaboration.
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Bross, Kristina. “Would India had beene never knowne”. Oxford University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190665135.003.0006.
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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.
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Ezell, Margaret J. M. Seen on Stage: Public Performances in London and the Court. Oxford University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780191849572.003.0012.
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The changing nature of London’s commercial theatres was seen in the increasing involvement of singers, dancers, and spectacular effects. Many playwrights including Dryden, Wycherley, and Behn were adapting earlier plays by Shakespeare and Molière. New playwrights including Nathaniel Lee and Thomas Otway relied on sensational violence and effects in their tragedies and created the proto-types for the ‘she-tragedies’ offering spectacles of female suffering.
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Ezell, Margaret J. M. Seen on Stage: English Operas, the Female Wits, and the ‘Reformed’ Stage. Oxford University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198183112.003.0022.
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The final decade of the century saw changes and challenges to the London commercial stage, including Jeremy Collier’s attack on it for profanity and immorality. Dramatists including Dryden, Congreve, and Southerne defended their writings as promoting good morality, while a group of female dramatists comprising Mary Pix, Delarivier Manley, and Catharine Trotter became a target of satire, referred to as the ‘Female Wits’. Audiences were increasingly interested in new forms of plays called ‘operas’ that required more singers, dancers and stage effects.
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Ezell, Margaret J. M. Poets and the Politics of Patronage and Literary Criticism. Oxford University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198183112.003.0015.
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Some of the most prominent and powerful literary and artistic patrons were also highly regarded poets themselves, including the Earls of Rochester, Dorset, Mulgrave, and Roscommon. Dryden and other dramatists such as Shadwell and Etherege enjoyed support and preferment from them, as did poets including Matthew Prior and Nahum Tate. The poets and their patrons were shaping an emerging discourse of literary criticism with essays on tragedy, translation, and on satire, attempting to situate contemporary English writing in the context of classical models and Shakespeare.
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Ezell, Margaret J. M. 1700. Oxford University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198183112.003.0024.
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The final section covers the reign of William III after the death of his wife, the literary responses to the situation of Princess Anne following the death of her son, and the continuing tensions in Parliament between the Whigs and Tories. There were increasing literary satires on foreigners in power and the desire to define Englishness. After the death of John Dryden, dramatists including William Congreve and John Vanbrugh continued to resist Jeremy Collier’s desire to reform the theatre. Newcomers such as Alexander Pope and Susanna Centlivre arrived and made their debut as poets and dramatists. Satires against women and marriage continued against a backdrop of famous divorce trials, while writers such as Daniel Defoe called for a reformed society starting with the aristocratic elite.
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Quehen, A. H. De. Editing Poetry from Spenser to Dryden: Papers Given at the 16th Annual Conference on Editorial Problems Univ of Toronto 31, Oct.-1, Nov. 1980. AMS Press, 1987.
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Sherry, Beverley. Lost and Regained in Translation. Oxford University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198754824.003.0003.
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This chapter argues that the translation of poetry can work as an instrument to identify the genius of the original poem, in particular to single out aural effects that are part of meaning and are lost in translation. First, the longstanding controversy over whether it is possible to translate poetry is addressed: while Frost’s dictum that ‘poetry is what is lost in translation’ provides a starting point, the theories of Dryden and Steiner are fundamental to the enquiry. Three translations of Paradise Lost are examined: two interlingual versions, the German of Haak (1681) and the French of Himy (2001), and the intralingual translation by Danielson (2008). The foreign-language versions throw light on Milton’s original by way of shock effect, while Danielson’s English paraphrase offers an opportunity to distinguish minute sound effects that are part of the poem’s meaning and central to Milton’s genius.
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Holmes, Richard. Bagpipes no Musick. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198736233.003.0003.
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Allan Ramsay (1684–1758) is known chiefly as the promoter of a revival in Scots poetry. This has been seen as a form of nationalist, even Jacobite resistance to post-Union anglicization and Whiggism. Ramsay’s efforts were criticized by some for ‘barbarity’; ‘Bagpipes no Musick’ was the title of a typical attack. One of his defenders was James Arbuckle (1700-42), a Glasgow/Irish poet, a unionist Whig, whose Scottish poems included Glotta (Latin for Clyde), an extended meditation on post-Union Scotland. Arbuckle’s poems were in standard English and acknowledged the influence of Pope, Addison, and Dryden. Nevertheless Ramsay and Arbuckle exchanged friendly poetic epistles, which recognized a joint enterprise of Scottish literary improvement. This chapter considers Ramsay through his relationship with Arbuckle, exploring themes in post-Union Scots culture including the poetic use of Scots, attitudes to union, Augustanism, Horatianism, and the literary patronage of the Scottish Whigs.
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Ezell, Margaret J. M. 1674–1675. Oxford University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198183112.003.0013.
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London continued to be the centre for literary publications ranging from cheap ephemera broadsides and ballads to works offering self-improvement, such as dictionaries, and new fiction, called novels, for entertainment. The ongoing wars with the Dutch resulted in satires and lampoons on the government and the court. Parliament was increasingly concerned with the royal succession and manuscript newsbooks carried information and gossip from London and the continent into the provinces, including the Indian wars in New England. The taste in theatre favoured witty contemporary comedies by William Wycherley, John Dryden, and Aphra Behn and sensational tragedies by new dramatists including Thomas Otway and Nathaniel Lee. Productions often featured spectacular scenery, music, and special effects. Didactic writers such as Richard Baxter and Samuel Clarke offered guidance for humble readers in everyday devotional situations.
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Holberton, Edward. Empire and Natural Law in Dryden’s Heroic Drama. Edited by Lorna Hutson. Oxford University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199660889.013.43.
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Dryden’s early heroic plays find dramatic potential in early modern natural law debates about sovereignty, and explore the language of contract central to these debates. The Indian Emperour interrogates the context of Spain’s claims to empire in the new world, reflecting the historical moment of England’s growing colonial ambitions. The Conquest of Granada shows how natural law’s metaphors of contract can destabilize an empire from within, as Dryden’s hero Almanzor employs them to contest and divide. Almanzor’s claims connect to an earlier critical exchange between Davenant and Hobbes on the cultural influence of epic romance and theatre in relation to political instability. Dryden’s play, however, works to redeem romance from its association with the misinterpretation of passion and interest in Hobbes’s writing. In The Conquest of Granada, romance and theatre become part of the process of refined law-making, providing a culture of propriety and discrimination which supports the artifice of empire.
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Braden, Gordon. The Passion of Dido. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198810810.003.0006.
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This chapter’s discussion of translations of Book 4 of the Aeneid spans sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English renditions of Virgil, when England and the English language were becoming prominent on the European and global scene. There is a consistent self-consciousness in this effort of using Virgil as a vehicle for translatio imperii, but also in the search for an English metre and idiom which could adequately convey the epic gravity of the ancient epic poetry. Braden shows that while most of the translations of this era usually serve as the background to the most prominent of them, that of Dryden, they nonetheless are important for understanding how translation practices developed at that time. Book 4, in which the hero’s imperial mission is most seriously threatened, provides a focus of discussion of some key passages that illuminate the literary tendencies of that time.
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Coiro, Ann Baynes. Reading. Edited by Henry S. Turner. Oxford University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199641352.013.28.
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This chapter examines the fortunes of ‘theatricality’ after the closing of the public theatres in 1642 and into the Restoration, with particular emphasis on how reading influenced notions of early modern theatre. It considers the question of early modern theatre and its relationship to the emerging concepts of drama and literary criticism by focusing on Humphrey Moseley and John Dryden. It also explores how the plays of William Shakespeare and Ben Jonson, Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher were revived by the companies of Thomas Killigrew and William Davenant and gradually transformed into a more readerly form of literary drama by the publishing efforts of Moseley and by the retrospective judgement of Dryden’sAn Essay of Dramatick Poesie. The chapter argues that, during the Restoration, ‘the London theater was crowded with old theatrical memories and new demands’, and that it had been fundamentally altered by its passage into print.
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Ezell, Margaret J. M. ‘The Great Business of Poetry’: Poets, Pastoral, and Politics. Oxford University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198183112.003.0028.
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Many poets first appeared in print in miscellanies published by John Dryden and Jacob Tonson that appeared in the 1690s and continued to be published through the first two decades of the eighteenth century, Others first appeared in periodicals such as the Spectator and the Guardian. Women poets including Mary Mollineux, Sarah Fyge, Elizabeth Singer Rowe, Mary Chudleigh, and Anne Finch published book-length collections. Among the most popular poetic forms were the Pindaric ode and the pastoral, some poets attempting to match classical models, others such as Gay making mocking use of the pastoral to comment on contemporary life. Isaac Watts published important and influential collections of hymns. Daniel Defoe published his longest satire, Jure Divino. Our view of many popular poets of this decade, however, including John Dennis, Thomas Tickell, Richard Blackmore, and Ambrose Philips, has been through the lens of Alexander Pope’s later satire on his contemporaries, The Dunciad.
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Hoxby, Blair. Passions. Edited by Henry S. Turner. Oxford University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199641352.013.29.
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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.
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Rosenthal, Laura J. Ways of the World. Cornell University Press, 2020. http://dx.doi.org/10.7591/cornell/9781501751585.001.0001.
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This book explores cosmopolitanism as it emerged during the Restoration and the role theater played in both memorializing and satirizing its implications and consequences. Rooted in the Stuart ambition to raise the status of England through two crucial investments — global traffic, including the slave trade, and cultural sophistication — this intensified global orientation led to the creation of global mercantile networks and to the rise of an urban British elite who drank Ethiopian coffee out of Asian porcelain at Ottoman-inspired coffeehouses. Restoration drama exposed cosmopolitanism's most embarrassing and troubling aspects, with such writers as Joseph Addison, Aphra Behn, John Dryden, and William Wycherley dramatizing the emotional and ethical dilemmas that imperial and commercial expansion brought to light. Altering standard narratives about Restoration drama, the book shows how the reinvention of theater in this period helped make possible performances that held the actions of the nation up for scrutiny, simultaneously indulging and ridiculing the violence and exploitation being perpetuated. In doing so, it reveals an otherwise elusive consistency between Restoration genres (comedy, tragedy, heroic plays, and tragicomedy), disrupts conventional understandings of the rise and reception of early capitalism, and offers a fresh perspective on theatrical culture in the context of the shifting political realities of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Britain.
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D'Addario, Christopher, and Matthew Augustine, eds. Texts and readers in the Age of Marvell. Manchester University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.7228/manchester/9781526113894.001.0001.
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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.
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Hone, Joseph. Literature and Party Politics at the Accession of Queen Anne. Oxford University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198814078.001.0001.
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This book is the first detailed study of the final Stuart succession crisis. It demonstrates for the first time the centrality of debates about royal succession to the literature and political culture of the early eighteenth century. Using previously neglected, misunderstood, and newly discovered material, it shows that arguments about Anne’s right to the throne were crucial to the construction of nascent party political identities. Literary texts were the principal vehicle through which contemporaries debated the new queen’s legitimacy. This book sheds fresh light on canonical authors such as Daniel Defoe, Alexander Pope, and Joseph Addison by setting their writing alongside the work of lesser known but nonetheless important figures such as John Tutchin, William Pittis, Nahum Tate, John Dennis, Henry Sacheverell, Charles Leslie, and other anonymous and pseudonymous authors. Through close historical readings, it shows how this new generation of poets, preachers, and pamphleteers transformed older models of succession writing by Milton, Dryden, and others, and imbued conventional genres such as panegyric and satire with their own distinctive poetics. By immersing the major authors in their milieu, and reconstructing the political and material contexts in which those authors wrote, this book demonstrates the vitality of debates about royal succession in early eighteenth-century culture.
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Allsopp, Niall. Poetry and Sovereignty in the English Revolution. Oxford University Press, 2020. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198861065.001.0001.
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This book presents a new interpretation of the poetry of the English Revolution, by focusing on royalist poets who left royalism behind following the execution of the king. These poets reimagined the traditional language of allegiance, articulating a flexible yet absolute form of sovereignty, applicable to a republic, or even to a Cromwellian monarchy. This sovereignty was artificial, and generated through the poetic imagination. Several chapters chart the poets’ close acquaintance with Thomas Hobbes, offering new readings of the reception and adaptation of Hobbes’s ideas in contemporary poetry. This context yields new insights into well-known poems by Andrew Marvell, Edmund Waller, and John Dryden. But it also newly opens up major works that have been neglected, including the two original English epics of the Commonwealth period, by William Davenant and Abraham Cowley, along with the early career of Margaret Cavendish, and the plays of Roger Boyle, Earl of Orrery. A final chapter traces how the poets survived the restoration of Stuart monarchy, showing how they continued to apply their ideas in the heroic drama of the 1660s. The book builds on recent work in both literary criticism and the history of political thought, to contextualize the poets within a distinctive strain of absolutism inflected by reason of state, neostoicism, scepticism, and anti-clericalism. It demonstrates a vivid poetic effort to imagine the expanded state delivered by the English Revolution.
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Keymer, Thomas. Poetics of the Pillory. Oxford University Press, 2019. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198744498.001.0001.
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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.
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Augustine, Matthew C. Aesthetics of contingency. Manchester University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.7228/manchester/9781526100764.001.0001.
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Aesthetics of contingency provides an important reconsideration of seventeenth-century literature in light of new understandings of the English past. Emphasising the contingency of the political in revolutionary England and its extended aftermath, Matthew Augustine challenges prevailing literary histories plotted according to structural conflicts and teleological narrative. In their place, he offers an innovative account of imaginative and polemical writing, in an effort to view later seventeenth-century literature on its own terms: without certainty about the future, or indeed the recent past. In hewing to this premise, the familiar outline of the period – with red lines drawn at 1642, 1660, or 1688 – becomes suggestively blurred. For all of Milton’s prophetic gestures, for all of Dryden’s presumption to speak for, to epitomise his Age, writing from the later decades of the seventeenth century remained supremely responsive to uncertainty, to the tremors of civil conflict and to the enduring crises and contradictions of Stuart governance. A study of major writings from the Personal Rule to the Glorious Revolution and beyond, this book also re-examines the material conditions of literature in this age. By carefully deciphering the multi-layered forces at work in acts of writing and reception, and with due consideration for the forms in which texts were cast, this book explores the complex nature of making meaning in and making meaning out of later Stuart England.