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. With an eye to the elusive and complicated Andrew Marvell as tutelary figure of the age, the contributors have provided nuanced and sophisticated readings of a range of seventeenth-century authors, often foregrounding the uncertainties and complexities with which these writers were faced as the remarkable events of these years 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. -- .

This new study raises fundamental questions about the nature of imaginative writing in the age of 'England's troubles'. Drawing energy from recent debates in Stuart history, this book looks past the traditional watersheds of Restoration and Revolution, plotting the responsiveness of seventeenth-century writers to the tremors of civil conflict and to the enduring crises and contradictions of Stuart governance. Augustine draws freely from the insights and strategies of contextual analysis, close reading, and critical theory in a bid to defamiliarise major texts of the period, from the poetry of young Milton to the brilliant works of adaptation, translation, and bricolage that characterised Dryden's last decade. Muting the antagonisms and conflicts that have dominated previous accounts, Aesthetics of contingency thus proposes to write the literary history of this period anew. -- .

John Wilmot, second Earl of Rochester (1647-1680), the notorious and brilliant libertine poet of King Charles II's court, has long been considered an embodiment of the Restoration era. This interdisciplinary collection of essays by leading scholars focuses new attention on, and brings fresh perspectives to, the writings of Lord Rochester. Particular consideration is given to the political force and social identity of Rochester's work, to the worlds - courtly and theatrical, urban and suburban - from which Rochester's poetry emerged and which it discloses, and not least to the unsettling aesthetic power of Rochester's writing. The singularity of Rochester's voice - his 'matchless wit' - has been widely recognised; this book encourages the continued appreciation of all the ways in which Rochester reveals the layered and promiscuous character of literary projects throughout the whole of a brilliant, abrasive, and miscellaneous age.

John Wilmot, second Earl of Rochester (1647-1680), the notorious and brilliant libertine poet of King Charles II's court, has long been considered an embodiment of the Restoration era. This interdisciplinary collection of essays by leading scholars focuses new attention on, and brings fresh perspectives to, the writings of Lord Rochester. Particular consideration is given to the political force and social identity of Rochester's work, to the worlds - courtly and theatrical, urban and suburban - from which Rochester's poetry emerged and which it discloses, and not least to the unsettling aesthetic power of Rochester's writing. The singularity of Rochester's voice - his 'matchless wit' - has been widely recognised; this book encourages the continued appreciation of all the ways in which Rochester reveals the layered and promiscuous character of literary projects throughout the whole of a brilliant, abrasive, and miscellaneous age.