This study of Dryden's thought argues that Dryden was the first English poet after Shakespeare to engage in historical reflection upon his own culture. It argues that Dryden exercised the moral integrity of a public poet and brought home to his audience the meaning of their historical experience.

This book examines how English writers from the Elizabethan period to the Restoration transformed and contested the ancient ideal of the virtuous mean. As early modern authors learned at grammar school and university, Aristotle and other classical thinkers praised "golden means" balanced between extremes: courage, for example, as opposed to cowardice or recklessness. By uncovering the enormous variety of English responses to this ethical doctrine, Joshua Scodel revises our understanding of the vital interaction between classical thought and early modern literary culture. Scodel argues that English authors used the ancient schema of means and extremes in innovative and contentious ways hitherto ignored by scholars. Through close readings of diverse writers and genres, he shows that conflicting representations of means and extremes figured prominently in the emergence of a self-consciously modern English culture. Donne, for example, reshaped the classical mean to promote individual freedom, while Bacon held extremism necessary for human empowerment. Imagining a modern rival to ancient Rome, georgics from Spenser to Cowley exhorted England to embody the mean or lauded extreme paths to national greatness. Drinking poetry from Jonson to Rochester expressed opposing visions of convivial moderation and drunken excess, while erotic writing from Sidney to Dryden and Behn pitted extreme passion against the traditional mean of conjugal moderation. Challenging his predecessors in various genres, Milton celebrated golden means of restrained pleasure and self-respect. Throughout this groundbreaking study, Scodel suggests how early modern treatments of means and extremes resonate in present-day cultural debates.

This book introduces students to drama from the Restoration of Charles II in 1660 to the early 18th Century. Susan Owen offers representative coverage of new forms of drama in this period, and of ways in which old forms are altered. Her study covers heroic drama, comedy, tragedy, tragi-comedy, and Shakespeare adaptations, by focusing on specific 'dramatic highlights' and giving close reading of particular plays.

Recognition is often considered a means to de-escalate conflicts and promote peaceful social interactions. This volume explores the forms that social recognition and its withholding may take in asymmetric armed conflicts, examining the risks and opportunities that arise when local, state, and transnational actors recognise, misrecognise, or deny recognition of armed non-state actors.By studying key asymmetric conflicts through the prism of recognition, it offers an innovative perspective on the interactions between armed non-state actors and state actors. In what contexts does granting recognition to armed non-state actors foster conflict transformation? What happens when governments withhold recognition or label armed non-state actors in ways they perceive as misrecognition? The authors examine the ambivalence of recognition processes in violent conflicts and their sometimes-unintended consequences. The volume shows that, while non-recognition prevents conflict transformation, the recognition of armed non-state actors may produce counterproductive precedents and new modes of exclusion in intra-state and transnational politics.

The quarrel between the ancients and moderns was resumed in the 17th century as writers and artists debated how far to risk the freedom to innovate. This text argues that it was this tension that gave unity to the cultural life of the period and helped define its baroque character.

American, British, and Australian scholars of English gathered at Yale University in October 2000 to mark the tercentenary of the British writer's death. Their 14 essays explore such aspects as modernity and exclusion in his The Spanish Fryar, his translation of Juvenal's Sixth Satire, and his Hamlet as an unwritten masterpiece. Distributed by Associated University Presses. Annotation c2004 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com).

In Dryden's writing, enthusiasm is a source of literary authority. It signals divinely inspired literary creativity. It is central to Dryden's theoretical defences of the relationship between literature and the passions. It is also crucial to his poetic practice in a variety of genres, from odes to religious poems to translations. Enthusiasm, for Dryden, ultimately enables literature to break into regions of knowledge beyond rational human comprehension. Yet after the rise of radical sectarianism in the 1640s and 1650s, where claims of inspiration legitimised challenges to established political authority, enthusiasm also carried dangerous theological and political connotations. In Dryden's writing, enthusiasm is thus also a pejorative term. It is used to attack political radicals and religious dissenters. In the aftermath of the Civil Wars, it is at the root of many perceived threats to the stability of the Restoration state. This book explores the paradoxical place of enthusiasm in Dryden's writing and the role he conceived for it in art and society after the violent upheavals of the mid seventeenth century. Works from across his oeuvre are explored, from his early essays and heroic plays to his translations, via new readings of his famous political and religious poems. These are read alongside other major writers of the period, like Milton, and less well-known authors, such as John Dennis. The book suggests new ways of conceptualising the relationship between literary practice and ideological allegiance in Restoration England. It reveals Dryden to be a writer who was consistently interested in the limits of what literature could express, what feelings it could provoke, and what it could make people believe at a time when such questions were of uncertain political importance.

This book argues that philosophical skepticism helps define the aesthetic experience of the sublime in late seventeenth- and eighteenth-century British literature, especially the poetry of Alexander Pope. Skeptical doubt appears in the period as an astonishing force in discourse that cannot be controlled--"doubt's boundless Sea," in Rochester's words--and as such is consistently seen as affiliated with the sublime, itself emerging as an important way to conceive of excessive power in rhetoric, nature, psychology, religion, and politics. This view of skepticism as a force affecting discourse beyond its practitioners' control links Noggle's discussion to other theoretical accounts of sublimity, especially psychoanalytic and ideological ones, that emphasize the sublime's activation of unconscious personal and cultural anxieties and contradictions. But because The Skeptical Sublime demonstrates the sublime's roots in the epistemological obsessions of Pope and his age, it also grounds such theories in what is historically evident in the period's writing. The skeptical sublime is a concrete, primary instance of the transformation of modernity's main epistemological liability, its loss of certainty, into an aesthetic asset--retaining, however, much of the unsettling irony of its origins in radical doubt. By examining the cultural function of such persistent instability, this book seeks to clarify the aesthetic ideology of major writers like Pope, Swift, Dryden, and Rochester, among others, who have been seen, sometimes confusingly, as both reactionary and supportive of the liberal-Whig model of taste and civil society increasingly dominant in the period. While they participate in the construction of proto-aesthetic categories like the sublime to stabilize British culture after decades of civil war and revolution, their appreciation of the skepticism maintained by these means of stabilization helps them express ambivalence about the emerging social order and distinguishes their views from the more providentially assured appeals to the sublime of their ideological opponents.

An encyclopedia designed especially to meet the needs of elementary, junior high, and senior high school students.

Volume XIII contains three of Dryden's Plays, along with accompanying scholarly appartus: All for Love, Oedipus, and Troilus and Cressida.