This collection of writings by English Renaissance poets and essayists includes poems and essays by Ben Jonson, George Chapman and Samuel Daniel. Excerpts from Francis Bacon, John Milton, William Drummond, George Herbert, Andrew Marvell, Abraham Cowley. The book also surveys the origins, range and development of literary taste and practice in 16th and 17th century England. Then, as now, poets anchored their lines between the poles of tradition and inspiration, loyalty and liberty, art and truth. Edward W. Tayler is the emeritus Lionel trilling Professor in the Humanities at Columbia University. His other books include Nature and Art in the Renaissance, Milton Poetry, and Donne Idea of a Woman. p> he selection is excellent?The introduction is most admirable and ?Tayler wisely is generous with explanations and identifications?His most volume supplants Sringarn as THE best collection of seventeenth-century criticism.?/p> Seventeenth-Century News Winter 1967

Joseph Addison: Tercentenary Essays is a collection of fifteen essays by a team of internationally recognized experts specially commissioned to commemorate the three hundredth anniversary of Addison's death in 2019. Almost exclusively known now as the inventor and main author of The Spectator, probably the most widely read and imitated prose work of the eighteenth century, Addison also produced important and influential work across a broad gamut of other literary modes—poems, verse translations, literary criticism, periodical journalism, drama, opera, travel writing. Much of this work is little known nowadays even in specialist academic circles; Addison is often described as the most neglected of the eighteenth century's major writers. This volume is the first collection to address the full range and variety of Addison's career and writings. Its fifteen chapters fall into three groupings: the first set study Addison's work in modes other than the literary periodical (poetry, translation, travel writing, drama); the second set address The Spectator from a variety of disciplinary perspectives (literary-critical, sociological and political, bibliographical); and the final set explore Addison's reception within several cultural spheres (philosophy, horticulture, art history), by individual writers or across larger historical periods (the Romantic age, the Victorian age), and in Britain and Europe, especially France. The volume provides an overdue and appropriately diverse memorial to one of the dominant men of letters of the Georgian era.

Thomas Carlyle's history of the French Revolution captured the Victorian imagination with vivid pictures of a society in conflict. A rich, brilliant, and arresting book, it defined a crucial epoch in modern European history for generations of British readers. Nevertheless, The French Revolution has lost not only its general readership but also its academic audience, for it is not history as history is commonly practiced, and it is not literature as literature is commonly understood. Only in the past few decades has this difficult yet rewarding text moved back to the central position it deserves. In A Disimprisoned Epic, Mark Cumming elucidates the formal genesis of the French Revolution in Carlyle's literary criticism and reestablishes it as an epic experiment in literary form. He discusses specifically how The French Revolution combines the myths of epic with the facts of history; the nobility of tragedy with the grotesque absurdity of farce; the devotion of elegy with the dismissive rancor of satire; and the didactic clarity of emblem and allegory with the confusion of symbol, fragment, and phantasmagory. A Disimprisoned Epic will be useful to scholars and students of Carlyle and of Victorian British and American literature.

The paperback edition, in four volumes, of this standard work will make it readily available to students. The scope of the work makes it valuable as a work of reference, connecting one period with another and placing each author clearly in the setting of his time. Reviewing the first edition, The Times Literary Supplement commented: ‘in inclusiveness and in judgment it has few rivals of its kind’. This third volume covers the Restoration and the Eighteenth Century (1660-1789) and is co-authored by George Sherburn and Donald F. Bond (both at the University of Chicago).

Edited with an introduction and notes by James T. Boulton. 'One of the greatest essays ever written on art.'– The Guardian Edmund Burke’s A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful is one of the most important works of aesthetics ever published. Whilst many writers have taken up their pen to write of "the beautiful", Burke’s subject here was the quality he uniquely distinguished as "the sublime"—an all-consuming force beyond beauty that compelled terror as much as rapture in all who beheld it. It was an analysis that would go on to inspire some of the leading thinkers of the age, including Immanuel Kant and Denis Diderot. The Routledge Classics edition presents the authoritative text of the first critical edition of Burke’s essay ever published, including a substantial critical and historical commentary. Edmund Burke (1729–1797). A politician, philosopher and orator, Burke lived during a turbulent time in world history, which saw revolutions in America and France that inspired his most famous work, Reflections on the Revolution in France.

The appeal of the sublime in the minds of British critics and poets during the eighteenth century holds a unique position in the history of aesthetics. At no other time has aesthetics displayed a similar interest in the experience of the sublime. This book explores the impulses behind the fascination for that experience. The Greek treatise Peri Hupsous by Longinus constitutes the earliest source for the experience of the sublime, and as such it shaped much of British eighteenth-century criticism. But the attraction of the sublime received stimulus from other sources as well. In the effort to expand the context of the sublime, the author considers the incentives provided not only by Longinus, but also by the criticism of intellectual literature during the second half of the seventeenth century; a body of criticism that was not primarily concerned with the sublime, but which nevertheless served as an important link to its subsequent appeal.

"Explores Milton's relationship to his contemporaries and early eighteenth-century heirs, demonstrating that some of Milton's earliest readers were more perceptive than Romantic and twentieth-century interpreters"--Publisher.