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

"The present volume [3] is the first to appear of the five that will comprise The Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature (henceforth OHCREL). Each volume of OHCREL will have its own editor or team of editors"--Preface.

This study referred to as a "preface" is given this designation because its basic aim is not to offer an up-to-date overall assessment of Dryden's translation of Virgil's Æneid but, rather, to provide a relevant basis for such an assessment ?thus allowing for a wide range of readership. The relevance of this approach rests on two basic premises: that of R. A. Brower, who maintains "that no translation can be understood or properly evaluated apart from the conditions of expression under which it was made," supported by Dryden's expressed intention "to make Virgil speak such English, as he wou'd himself have spoken, if he had been born in England, and in this present age," together providing a genuinely relevant basis for an understanding of Dryden's translation, "the conditions of expression" here allowing the inclusion of all the possible implications this phrase includes.

Sociable Criticism in England explores how from 1625 to 1725 cultural practices and discourses of sociability (rules for small-group discussion, friendship discourse, and patron-client relationships) determined the venues within which critical judgments were rendered, disseminated, and received. It establishes how individuals operating in small groups were authorized to circulate critical judgments and commentary, why certain modes of critical exchange were treated as beyond the ken of good social manners, and how such expectations were subverted or manipulated to avoid the imputation that individuals had violated the standards for offering public criticism. Philips, George Villiers, John Dryden, Lady Margaret Cavendish, John Dennis, and Joseph Addison, this study argues that seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century criticism could circulate either orally, in manuscript, or in print so long as it appeared to originate in interpersonal encounters considered appropriate to critical discussion.

John Dryden was first published in 1976. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions. This annotated bibliography represents a comprehensive updating of Samuel Holt Monk's earlier work, also published by the University of Minnesota Press, John Dryden: A List of Critical Studies Published from 1895 to 1948 (out of print). Since the publication of that earlier bibliography, the number of studies devoted to Dryden has more than tripled, and thus this new bibliography is essential for scholars of Dryden or related aspects of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century English literature. This volume contains four times as many entries as the earlier volume, and there is an extensive introduction by Professor Latt which surveys the historical shifts in critical opinion of Dryden. The new volume incorporates all of the listings contained in the first one. The entries include works that focus directly on Dryden, those that discuss Dryden's works in the context of other writers, and those that investigate material of general importance to Dryden studies. Dissertations from American, German, English, and French universities are included. Complete bibliographic information is provided for virtually every entry. The listings are grouped in nine categories, and there is an additional section which covers festschriften and other collections of essays. Works of exceptional value and those which develop new points of view are so designated. The publishing history of each item is included along with the standard bibliographic information. The index includes topical as well as author entries.

Publisher description

A major new study of the notorious Restoration rake-poet, set in his intellectual context.

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.