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.

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 book provides an accessible account of the poet and politician Andrew Marvell’s life (1621-1678) and of the great events which found reflection in his work and in which he and his writings eventually played a part. At the same time, considerable space is afforded to reflecting deeply on the modes and meanings of Marvell’s art, redressing the balance of recent biography and criticism which has tended to dwell on the public and political aspects of this literary life at the expense of lyric invention and lyric possibility. Moving beyond the familiar terms of imitation and influence, the book aims at reconstructing an embodied history of reading and writing, acts undertaken within a series of complex physical and social environments, from the Hull Charterhouse to the coffee houses and print shops of Restoration London. Care has been taken to cover the whole of Marvell’s career, in verse and prose, even as the book places the lyric achievement at the centre of its vision.

This Element allows pastoral letters to be analysed as a distinct literary genre that contributed in complex ways to early modern practices of caregiving, negotiating political oppression, geographical isolation, and colonial experimentation.

Reevaluates early modern poems of praise as, paradoxically, challenging an artistic economy that values exchange and productivity Early modern poems of praise typically insist that they do not have a purpose or enact real labor beyond their effortless listing of laudable qualities. And yet the poets discussed in this study, including Ben Jonson, Andrew Marvell, Anne Bradstreet, Lucy Hutchinson, and John Milton, hint at an alternative aesthetic economy at work in their verse. Poetic praise, it turns out, might show us a social world outside the organizing principle of exchange. In Economies of Praise: Value, Labor, and Form in Seventeenth‐Century English Poetry, Ryan Netzley explores how poems of praise imagine alternatives to market and gift economies and point instead to a self-contained aesthetic economy that works against a more expansive and productivist understanding of literary art. By depicting exchange as inconsequential, unproductive, and redundant rather than a necessary constituent of social order, these poems model for modern readers a world without the imperative to create, appraise, and repeatedly demonstrate one’s own value.

An enigmatic men, whose poems balance opposing principles-Royalism and Republicanism, spirituality and sexuality.

Feeling Faint is a book about human consciousness in its most basic sense: the awareness, at any given moment, that we live and feel. Such awareness, it argues, is distinct from the categories of selfhood to which it is often assimilated, and can only be uncovered at the margins of first-person experience. What would it mean to be conscious without being a first person—to be conscious in the absence of a self? Such a phenomenon, subsequently obscured by the Enlightenment identification of consciousness and personal identity, is what we discover in scenes of swooning from the Renaissance: consciousness without self, consciousness reconceived as what Frederic Jameson calls "a registering apparatus for transformed states of being." Where the early modern period has often been seen in terms of the rise of self-aware subjectivity, Feeling Faint argues that swoons, faints, and trances allow us to conceive of Renaissance subjectivity in a different guise: as the capacity of the senses and passions to experience, regulate, and respond to their own activity without the intervention of first-person awareness. In readings of Renaissance authors ranging from Montaigne to Shakespeare, Pertile shows how self-loss affords embodied consciousness an experience of itself in a moment of intimate vitality which precedes awareness of specific objects or thoughts—an experience with which we are all familiar, and yet which is tantalizingly difficult to pin down.