Steven N. Zwicker

Refiguring Revolutions Aesthetics and Politics From the English Revolution to the Romantic Revolution

This text presents a reassessment of the cultural and political history of England and suggests alternative approaches to the study of 17th and 18th-century England. It sets about returning aesthetics to the centre of the master narrative of politics. Focus is on topics and moments that illuminate the connection between aesthetic issues of a private or public nature and political culture . Politics between the Puritan and Romantic Revolutions, the authors argue, was a set of social and aesthetic practices, a narrative of presentations, exchanges, and performances as much as it was a story of monarchies and ministries.

Politics and language in Dryden's poetry : the arts of disguise

This study of Drydens poetic career addresses the nature of covert argument in an age of violently contested political and religious issues.Originally published in 1982.The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These paperback editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Andrew Marvell, orphan of the hurricane

Acknowledgments Abbreviations Chronology: Events Towards a Life Introduction: Towards an Interpretable Whole 1. Work of Service 2. The Toils of Patriarchy 3. Wounds of Desire 4. Secrecies and Disclosures 5. Into the World Conclusion Appendix: Chronology and the Lyric Career of Andrew Marvell Bibliography

Eros and Abuse: Imagining Andrew Marvell

Andrew Marvells The unfortunate Lover narrates a gothic story of abuse, wounding, and incoherence for which the victim finds solace in the eternity of verse. Critics have lamented the poems extravagance and seeming failure of control; it is, however, as tightly controlled in its argument as any of Marvells more familiar verse, and its extravagance is scarcely unmotivated. The similarities between the gestures and images of The unfortunate Lover and insistent passages elsewhere in Marvells texts, both verse and prose, suggest that the story of this self imagined in the poem had deep and enduring meaning for the poet. The poems scenes of abuse and incoherence are in fact key to opening Marvells entire story of the self and to new ways of understanding the situation of the topical and occasional in Marvells lyric project.

The Cambridge companion to Andrew Marvell

Chronology 1. Introduction Derek Hirst and Steven N. Zwicker 2. The social modes of Marvells poetry James Loxley 3. Marvell and the literary past Paul Davis 4. Borders and transitions in Marvells poetry Matthew C. Augustine 5. Thinking of gender Diane Purkiss 6. Marvell and the designs of art Michael Schoenfeldt 7. Andrew Marvells citizenship Phil Withington 8. The green Marvell Andrew McRae 9. A Cromwellian centre? Joad Raymond 10. The poets religion John Spurr 11. Adversarial Marvell Nicholas Von Maltzahn 12. How to make a biography of Andrew Marvell Nigel Smith Further reading Index.

JOHN DRYDEN, THE HOUSE OF ORMOND, AND THE POLITICS OF ANGLO-IRISH PATRONAGE

This article analyses John Drydens personal and textual relations with the Butlers of Ormond as they are played out over four decades in a series of texts – Absalom and Achitophel (1681), the dedication of his Life of Plutarch (1683), the engraved plates of the Aeneid (1697), and the verse which opens Fables (1700). This detailed case study uncovers the nature and complexities of literary patronage during years of rebellion, war and intense political uncertainty. It addresses issues central to restoration politics and society – lineage, legitimacy, loyalty, honour, and reputation – and suggests how these issues might be explored more fully by both historians and literary scholars.

The green Marvell

To write about nature and the environment in Marvell’s poetry is to risk accusations of simple-mindedness. For nature is rarely – if ever – just nature for Marvell. In the tradition of pastoral poetry, the natural world provides an avenue, with its own rich and highly stylized stock of imagery, for reflecting on wider issues of human life, ranging from love and sexuality through to matters of state. Indeed, in the context of the mid seventeenth century, as other essays in this volume repeatedly remind us, politics infiltrated all poetic kinds, imprinting its own logic and symbolism even upon apparently uncommitted texts. In Marvell’s estate poem Upon Appleton House, To My Lord Fairfax , for example, ‘the tallest oak’, brought down by the ‘feeble stroke’ of a woodpecker, is also King Charles I, executed by the stroke of an axe just a few years before the poem was written (lines 551–2). But sometimes it is worth stating the obvious. While a tree may carry many associations within a poem, there is surely some value to be derived from considering it as a tree. Moreover, there is arguably some cause, given Marvell’s repeated attention to the natural environment, to engage with the insights of the emergent body of ‘eco-criticism’, which is committed to exploring the ways in which ecological discourses shape and inform literary texts. This approach, like so many others one might take to Marvell, comes hedged with caveats. Marvell is not a programmatic poet. Hence, just as it is notoriously difficult to ascribe coherent political arguments to his works, it is fruitless to try to position him as some kind of pre-modern environmental campaigner. Marvell is much more elusive than that; as Donald M. Friedman states, he is not so much a presenter of arguments as ‘an observer of the process of thought itself’.

Introduction: A Tercentenary Tribute

T hree hundred years after Drydens death nothing could be more obvious than the breadth and authority of his career. He is the most important poet of the late seventeenth century. He perfected the heroic couplet and deployed the idioms of literary mockery with unprecedented skill and originality; he fashioned masterful pindarics and commemorative verse; he wrote the greatest political satire in the language, and he absorbed and translated the idioms of Latin poetry over an entire lifetime, creating an English Virgil that for some, even now, has no rival. If we add Drydens work as playwright and literary theorist to his accomplishments as poet and translator, we might wonder if there is, in the early modern period, another career so rich and various. Dryden invented, perhaps not quite from whole cloth, the heroic drama; together with Purcell he fashioned an English opera; after Sidneys Defence, the Essay of Dramatic Poesy is the defining text of the early modern literary imagination. And no one-not Milton or Marvell, not Burton or Browne, perhaps not even Clarendon-could touch the subtlety and mastery of Drydens prose. The essays and reviews gathered here are intended as a tribute to this remarkable career. Individually, these pieces help us to rethink Drydens encounter with the full range of political and cultural issues of his age: with the intricacies of court alliance, the temptations and dangers of empire, the dynamics of patronage and literary polemic, the frustrations ofloyalism, and the twilight world of Roman Catholic recusancy he entered near the close of his century. Collectively these essays also urge us to reflect on the breadth and varied circumstances of Drydens work and thereby on the chronology and character of early modernity, a category that often elides the Restoration and obscures its art. Dryden grew up in a Caroline culture, he began to write in a republic, he served two Stuart courts, and he lived through a revolution that changed the structure not only of politics but also of the life of letters. Dryden inhabited the world of Virgil and Horace, but as well that of Rochester, Buckingham, and Congreve; he was at his ease in the exercises of commonplacing and translation, but he also knew how to negotiate publishing contracts and literary fees. Dryden wrote as a