Steven N Zwicker - Böcker

A new and comprehensive selection of Dryden's poetry, revealing him as a master of theatricality, ventriloquism, and unmistakable originality. Brought together here are many of the poems from his time as Poet Laureate and loyal servant of the crown, including the Biblical allegory 'Absalom and Achitophel', in which the poet attacked those who intrigued against the King and earned himself a reputation for menace and a number of powerful enemies. His 'Works of Virgil' set the standard for the translation of Latin poetry. His last work, 'Fables Ancient and Modern' combined original verse and new translations, showing how he transformed the idioms and gestures of other voices and made them his own.

The Oxford Handbook of Restoration Literature begins by asking if there was a distinctive literature of the Restoration. For a long time, the answer seemed obvious: heroic drama, libertine comedy, scandalous lyrics, and the short but brilliant career of John Wilmot, earl of Rochester. Could there be an age when the coincidence of literary culture and political rule were any more obvious? But as this Handbook will remind us, some of the most wonderful literature of this Restoration came from writers who had lived across the decades of turbulence and into an age when the Stuart kings returned, when the Church and House of Lords were restored, a world made safe for bishops and for the memory of divine right rule. Of course, these returns and restorations did not meet with uniform celebration. John Milton wrote his great epic poems not in quiet submission but in a kind of resistance to the dominant culture of the 1660s, and Andrew Marvell produced his most brilliant satiric verse by holding up a looking glass to court corruption and Anglican intolerance. So we begin with the most obvious conclusion: Restoration literature does and does not fit to the categories that so long defined the late Stuart age. This book explores and contests, challenges and reimagines the experience embodied by the writing of the late Stuart world and invites readers new to this world and those who have often read its literatures to the pleasures but as well to the challenges and discomforts of its texts.

Augustine, Pertile and Zwicker celebrate the work of Andrew Marvell (1621-1678) in the quatercentenary year of his birth, combining the best historical scholarship with a varied and ambitious programme of cognitive, affective, and aesthetic inquiry. The essays have been specially commissioned for the quatercentenary and include the work of a range of scholars from Britain and North America. Acknowledged masterpieces such as the 'Horatian Ode', 'The Garden', and 'Upon Appleton House' are here read in light of historical and material evidence that has emerged in recent decades. At the same time, the volume offers many fresh points of entry into Marvell's work, with particular attention to the poet's lyric economies, Marvell's engagement with popular print, and, not least, the polyglot and transnational dimensions of his writing. The quatercentenary also represents an important anniversary for Marvell studies, marking one hundred years since T. S. Eliot's appreciation of the poet inaugurated modern Marvell criticism. As Imagining Andrew Marvell at 400 reassesses Marvell's writings it also reflects on the profession of English literature, taking stock of the discipline itself, where it has been and where it might be going as scholars continue to map the pleasures and challenges of reading and re-reading Andrew Marvell.

This volume in the 21st Century Oxford Authors series offers students an authoritative, comprehensive selection of the poetry and prose of John Dryden, the most important poet, dramatist, translator, and literary theorist of the later seventeenth century. He wrote across the tumultuous decades of political and cultural revolution--years stretching from the end of the Cromwellian Protectorate in 1659 through the reign of William III--and he addressed the crucial events of those decades. These were years of unprecedented political revolution, and of a remarkable transformation of English literary culture, with John Dryden at the literary centre. He invented new literary modes including the theatre of spectacle known as heroic drama; he perfected the heroic couplet, a form that became the chief instrument of public poetry; he adapted works of Shakespeare and Milton; he wrote excoriating satire; and he brought the translation of classical poetry to new levels of perfection; and throughout his career he wrote works of literary theory that defined his own practices and the literary ethos of his age. By the time that Dryden died in 1700 he had redefined English literary culture; his work recalled and embodied all the genres and modes of early modern literature and anticipated the brilliance of eighteenth-century satire as performed by Jonathan Swift and Alexander Pope.This edition represents the span of a long career in its remarkable variety. All the genres in which Dryden wrote are represented: panegyrics, lyrics, odes, epigrams, verse epistles, historical poems, commendatory verse, commemorative poems, religious poems, satires, plays, prologues and epilogues, translations, critical prose, dedications, prefaces, biography, and letters.Explanatory notes and commentary enhance the study, understanding, and enjoyment of these works, and the edition includes an Introduction to the life and works of Dryden, and a Chronology.

Biography appears to thrive as never before; and there clearly remains a broad readership for literary biography. But the methods and approaches of recent criticism which have contributed rich insights and asked new questions about the ways in which we interrogate and appreciate literature have scarcely influenced biography. Biography as a form has been largely unaffected by either new critical or historical perspectives. For early-modern scholars the biographical model, fashioned as a stable form in the eighteenth century, has been, in some respects, a distorting lens onto early-modern lives. In the Renaissance and early-modern period rather the biography's organic and developmental narratives of a coherent subject, lives were written and represented in a bewildering array of textual sites and generic forms. And such lives were clearly imagined and written not to entertain or even simply to inform, but to edify and instruct, to counsel and polemicize. It is only when we understand how early moderns imagined and narrated lives, only that is through a full return to history and an exact historicizing, that we can newly conceive the meaning of those lives and begin to rewrite their histories free of the imperatives and teleologies of Enlightenment. In Writing Lives literary scholars, cultural critics, and historians of ideas and visual media, currently engaged both with early modern conceptions of the life and our own conceptualizing of the biographical project, reflect on the problems of writing lives from the various perspectives of their own research and in the form of case studies informed by new questions.

This volume in the 21st Century Oxford Authors series offers students an authoritative, comprehensive selection of the poetry and prose of John Dryden, the most important poet, dramatist, translator, and literary theorist of the later seventeenth century. He wrote across the tumultuous decades of political and cultural revolution — years stretching from the end of the Cromwellian Protectorate in 1659 through the reign of William III — and he addressed the crucial events of those decades. These were years of unprecedented political revolution, and of a remarkable transformation of English literary culture, with John Dryden at the literary centre. He invented new literary modes including the theatre of spectacle known as heroic drama; he perfected the heroic couplet, a form that became the chief instrument of public poetry; he adapted works of Shakespeare and Milton; he wrote excoriating satire; he brought the translation of classical poetry to new levels of perfection; and throughout his career he wrote works of literary theory that defined his own practices and the literary ethos of his age. By the time that Dryden died in 1700 he had redefined English literary culture; his work recalled and embodied all the genres and modes of early modern literature and anticipated the brilliance of eighteenth-century satire.This edition represents the span of a long career in its remarkable variety. All the genres in which Dryden wrote are represented: panegyrics, lyrics, odes, epigrams, verse epistles, historical poems, commendatory verse, commemorative poems, religious poems, satires, plays, prologues and epilogues, translations, critical prose, dedications, prefaces, biography, and letters.Explanatory notes and commentary enhance the study, understanding, and enjoyment of these works, and the edition includes an Introduction to the life and works of Dryden, a Chronology and a Biographical Appendix.

Andrew Marvell, Orphan of the Hurricane studies the poetry and polemics of one of the greatest of early modern writers, a poet of immense lyric talent and political importance. The book situates these writings and this writer within the patronage networks and political upheavals of mid seventeenth-century England. Derek Hirst and Steven Zwicker track Marvell's negotiations among personalities and events; explores his idealizations, attachments, and subversions, and speculate on the meaning of the narratives that he told of himself within his writings -- what they call his 'imagined life'. Hirst and Zwicker draw the figure of an imagined life from the repeated traces Marvell left of lyric yearning and satiric anger, and suggest how these were rooted both in the body and in the imagination. The book sheds new light on some of Marvell's most familiar poems -- 'Upon Appleton House', 'The Garden',' To His Coy Mistress', and 'Horatian Ode' -- but at its centre is an extended reading of Marvell's 'The unfortunate Lover', his least familiar and surely most mysterious lyric, and his most sustained narrative of the self. By attending to the lyric, the polemical, and the parliamentary careers together, this book offers a reading, for the first time, of Marvell and his writings as an interpretable whole.

Biography appears to thrive as never before; and there clearly remains a broad readership for literary biography. But the methods and approaches of recent criticism which have contributed rich insights and asked new questions about the ways in which we interrogate and appreciate literature have scarcely influenced biography. Biography as a form has been largely unaffected by either new critical or historical perspectives. For early-modern scholars the biographical model, fashioned as a stable form in the eighteenth century, has been, in some respects, a distorting lens onto early-modern lives. In the Renaissance and early-modern period rather the biography's organic and developmental narratives of a coherent subject, lives were written and represented in a bewildering array of textual sites and generic forms. And such lives were clearly imagined and written not to entertain or even simply to inform, but to edify and instruct, to counsel and polemicize. It is only when we understand how early moderns imagined and narrated lives, only that is through a full return to history and an exact historicizing, that we can newly conceive the meaning of those lives and begin to rewrite their histories free of the imperatives and teleologies of Enlightenment. In Writing Lives literary scholars, cultural critics, and historians of ideas and visual media, currently engaged both with early modern conceptions of the life and our own conceptualizing of the biographical project, reflect on the problems of writing lives from the various perspectives of their own research and in the form of case studies informed by new questions.

The outstanding essays in this volume explore the interdependency of literature and history in seventeenth-century England. The relation of text to society is examined both as theory and as practice. The theoretical essays explore writing, reading, and the emergence of the aesthetic as historical phenomena of the seventeenth century. Other contributions examine cultural and political practices that fashioned the century: patronage, representations of authority, the socialization of party politics, and fables of power.  What is often separated as a distinct sphere of “literature” is returned to the contexts of other cultural and discursive practices. Using the shaping force of history on the imagination and the status of literature as historical evidence, the authors also claim the power of imaginative texts to mold as well as reflect history. Politics of Discourse not only increases our understanding of seventeenth-century England but also advances the study of subjects of interest to cultural critics of all historical periods: genre and canon, the interplay of institution and imagination, and the symbols of power.Contributors:  Barbara K. LewalskiMichael McKeonEarl MinerDavid NorbrookAnnabel PattersonJ. G. A. PocockPocockMary Ann RadzinowiczKevin SharpeBlair WordenSteven N. ZwickerThis title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1987.

Refiguring Revolutions presents an original and interdisciplinary reassessment of the cultural and political history of England from 1649 to 1789. Bypassing conventional chronologies and traditional notions of disciplinary divides, editors Kevin Sharpe and Steven Zwicker frame a set of new agendas for, and suggest new approaches to, the study of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century England.Customary periodization by dynasty and century obscures the aesthetic and cultural histories that were enacted between and even by the English Civil Wars and the French Revolution. The authors of the essays in this volume set about returning aesthetics to the center of the master narrative of politics. They focus on topics and moments that illuminate the connection between aesthetic issues of a private or public nature and political culture. Politics between the Puritan Revolution and the Romantic Revolution, these 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.This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1998.

Refiguring Revolutions presents an original and interdisciplinary reassessment of the cultural and political history of England from 1649 to 1789. Bypassing conventional chronologies and traditional notions of disciplinary divides, editors Kevin Sharpe and Steven Zwicker frame a set of new agendas for, and suggest new approaches to, the study of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century England.Customary periodization by dynasty and century obscures the aesthetic and cultural histories that were enacted between and even by the English Civil Wars and the French Revolution. The authors of the essays in this volume set about returning aesthetics to the center of the master narrative of politics. They focus on topics and moments that illuminate the connection between aesthetic issues of a private or public nature and political culture. Politics between the Puritan Revolution and the Romantic Revolution, these 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.This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1998.

The outstanding essays in this volume explore the interdependency of literature and history in seventeenth-century England. The relation of text to society is examined both as theory and as practice. The theoretical essays explore writing, reading, and the emergence of the aesthetic as historical phenomena of the seventeenth century. Other contributions examine cultural and political practices that fashioned the century: patronage, representations of authority, the socialization of party politics, and fables of power.  What is often separated as a distinct sphere of “literature” is returned to the contexts of other cultural and discursive practices. Using the shaping force of history on the imagination and the status of literature as historical evidence, the authors also claim the power of imaginative texts to mold as well as reflect history. Politics of Discourse not only increases our understanding of seventeenth-century England but also advances the study of subjects of interest to cultural critics of all historical periods: genre and canon, the interplay of institution and imagination, and the symbols of power.Contributors:  Barbara K. LewalskiMichael McKeonEarl MinerDavid NorbrookAnnabel PattersonJ. G. A. PocockPocockMary Ann RadzinowiczKevin SharpeBlair WordenSteven N. ZwickerThis title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1987.

This book ranges over private and public reading, and over a variety of religious, social, and scientific communities to locate acts of reading in specific historical moments from the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries. It also charts the changes in reading habits that reflect broader social and political shifts during the period. A team of expert contributors cover topics including the processes of book production and distribution, audiences and markets, the material text, the relation of print to performance, and the politics of acts of reception. In addition, the volume emphasises the independence of early modern readers and their role in making meaning in an age in which increased literacy equaled social enfranchisement and interpretation was power. Meaning was not simply an authorial act but the work of many hands and processes, from editing, printing, and proofing, to reproducing, distributing, and finally reading.

John Dryden, Poet Laureate to Charles II and James II, was one of the great literary figures of the late seventeenth century. This Companion provides a fresh look at Dryden's tactics and triumphs in negotiating the extraordinary political and cultural revolutions of his time. The newly commissioned essays introduce readers to the full range of his work as a poet, as a writer of innovative plays and operas, as a purveyor of contemporary notions of empire, and most of all as a man intimate with the opportunities of aristocratic patronage as well as the emerging market for literary gossip, slander and polemic. Dryden's works are examined in the context of seventeenth-century politics, publishing and ideas of authorship. A valuable resource for students and scholars, the Companion includes a full chronology of Dryden's life and times and a detailed guide to further reading.

This volume offers an account of English literary culture in one of its most volatile and politically engaged moments. From the work of Milton and Marvell in the 1650s and 1660s through the brilliant careers of Dryden, Rochester, and Behn, Locke and Astell, Swift and Defoe, Pope and Montagu, the pressures and extremes of social, political, and sexual experience are everywhere reflected in literary texts: in the daring lyrics and intricate political allegories of this age, in the vitriol and bristling topicality of its satires as well as in the imaginative flight of its mock epics, fictions, and heroic verse. The volume's chronologies and select bibliographies will guide the reader through texts and events, while the fourteen essays commissioned for this Companion will allow us to read the period anew.

Andrew Marvell is one of the greatest English lyric poets of the seventeenth century and one of its leading polemicists. This Companion brings a set of fresh questions and perspectives to bear on the varied career and diverse writings of a remarkable writer and elusive man. Drawing on important new editions of Marvell's poetry and of his prose, scholars of both history and literature examine Marvell's work in the contexts of Restoration politics and religion, and of the seventeenth-century publishing world in both manuscript and print. The essays, individually and collectively, address Marvell within his literary and cultural traditions and communities; his almost prescient sense of the economy and ecology of the country; his interest in visual arts and architecture; his opaque political and spiritual identities; his manners in controversy and polemic; the character of his erotic and transgressive imagination and his biography, still full of intriguing gaps.

John Dryden, Poet Laureate to Charles II and James II, was one of the great literary figures of the late seventeenth century. This Companion provides a fresh look at Dryden's tactics and triumphs in negotiating the extraordinary political and cultural revolutions of his time. The newly commissioned essays introduce readers to the full range of his work as a poet, as a writer of innovative plays and operas, as a purveyor of contemporary notions of empire, and most of all as a man intimate with the opportunities of aristocratic patronage as well as the emerging market for literary gossip, slander and polemic. Dryden's works are examined in the context of seventeenth-century politics, publishing and ideas of authorship. A valuable resource for students and scholars, the Companion includes a full chronology of Dryden's life and times and a detailed guide to further reading.

This book ranges over private and public reading, and over a variety of religious, social, and scientific communities to locate acts of reading in specific historical moments from the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries. It also charts the changes in reading habits that reflect broader social and political shifts during the period. A team of expert contributors cover topics including the processes of book production and distribution, audiences and markets, the material text, the relation of print to performance, and the politics of acts of reception. In addition, the volume emphasises the independence of early modern readers and their role in making meaning in an age in which increased literacy equaled social enfranchisement and interpretation was power. Meaning was not simply an authorial act but the work of many hands and processes, from editing, printing, and proofing, to reproducing, distributing, and finally reading.

Andrew Marvell is one of the greatest English lyric poets of the seventeenth century and one of its leading polemicists. This Companion brings a set of fresh questions and perspectives to bear on the varied career and diverse writings of a remarkable writer and elusive man. Drawing on important new editions of Marvell's poetry and of his prose, scholars of both history and literature examine Marvell's work in the contexts of Restoration politics and religion, and of the seventeenth-century publishing world in both manuscript and print. The essays, individually and collectively, address Marvell within his literary and cultural traditions and communities; his almost prescient sense of the economy and ecology of the country; his interest in visual arts and architecture; his opaque political and spiritual identities; his manners in controversy and polemic; the character of his erotic and transgressive imagination and his biography, still full of intriguing gaps.

This study of Dryden's 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 editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover 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.

This study of Dryden's 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 editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover 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.

Focusing on the turbulent years between the execution of Charles I and the triumph of William III, Steven N. Zwicker reads English literature as a series of brilliant and deeply engaged polemical contests. Zwicker juxtaposes overtly polemical writings—pamphlets, broadsides, and ballads—with canonical works, including epic, historical verse, tragedy, and satire, in order to demonstrate how literature not only reflected on political action but also formed an important site of political exchange. Zwicker maintains that the sources of Restoration culture lay within the civil war years of the 1640s and that the memory of those years shaped writing and politics for the remainder of the century. In sensitive readings of such classic texts as Walton's Compleat Angler, Marvell's First Anniversary and Last Instructions, Milton's Paradise Lost, Dryden's Annus Mirabilis and Absalom and Achitophel, and Locke's Two Treatises of Government, he shows how these texts both engaged with pamphlet, squib, and broadside and challenged one another over the possession of cultural authority. Zwicker's analysis provides a new understanding of the connections between politics and aesthetics in the later seventeenth century and an appreciation for the texture of this culture. Successfully integrating literary history and political analysis, Lines of Authority will be valuable reading for a broad audience in the fields of Restoration and Protectorate literature, literary history, cultural and intellectual history, and the history of political thought.

Focusing on the turbulent years between the execution of Charles I and the triumph of William III, Steven N. Zwicker reads English literature as a series of brilliant and deeply engaged polemical contests. Zwicker juxtaposes overtly polemical writings—pamphlets, broadsides, and ballads—with canonical works, including epic, historical verse, tragedy, and satire, in order to demonstrate how literature not only reflected on political action but also formed an important site of political exchange. Zwicker maintains that the sources of Restoration culture lay within the civil war years of the 1640s and that the memory of those years shaped writing and politics for the remainder of the century. In sensitive readings of such classic texts as Walton's Compleat Angler, Marvell's First Anniversary and Last Instructions, Milton's Paradise Lost, Dryden's Annus Mirabilis and Absalom and Achitophel, and Locke's Two Treatises of Government, he shows how these texts both engaged with pamphlet, squib, and broadside and challenged one another over the possession of cultural authority. Zwicker's analysis provides a new understanding of the connections between politics and aesthetics in the later seventeenth century and an appreciation for the texture of this culture. Successfully integrating literary history and political analysis, Lines of Authority will be valuable reading for a broad audience in the fields of Restoration and Protectorate literature, literary history, cultural and intellectual history, and the history of political thought.

Matthew Arnold praised Dryden's poetry for inaugurating an age of prose; what he might better have appreciated is Dryden's creation of modern prose itself. This is the only stand-alone edition of Dryden's prose available; it introduces and annotates texts that honour the orthography and accidentals of first and early editions, distilling earlier commentary and presenting fresh interpretations of his work. The clarity, nuance, and ease of Dryden's voice in prose distinguish his writing from the first pages of The Essay of Dramatick Poesie to the beautiful cadences of the Preface to Fables at the end of his career. Dryden's poetry and drama are widely available and appreciated, yet his prose has been difficult of access. That writing, its many pleasures, and its importance in creating the prose of the modern world are here restored to view for contemporary readers.

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.