Now available in paperback, this is the first full-scale history of early modern English literature in nearly a century. It offers new perspectives on English literature produced in Britain between the Reformation and the Restoration. While providing the general coverage and specific information expected of a major history, its twenty-six chapters address recent methodological and interpretive developments in English literary studies. The book has five sections: Modes and Means of Literary Production, Circulation, and Reception , The Tudor Era from the Reformation to Elizabeth I , The Era of Elizabeth and James VI , The Earlier Stuart Era , and The Civil War and Commonwealth Era . While England is the principal focus, literary production in Scotland, Ireland and Wales is treated, as are other subjects less frequently examined in previous histories, including women s writings and the literature of the English Reformation and Revolution. This innovatively-designed history is an essential resource for specialists and students.

One-stop resource offering complete textbook for courses in seventeenth-century literature - progressing from introductory topics through to overviews of current research.

The present book is third in a series of works which aim to expose the complexity and essence, power and extent of the major periods, movements, trends, genres, authors, and literary texts in the history of English literature. Following this aim, the series will consist of monographs which cover the most important ages and experiences of English literary history, including Anglo-Saxon or Old English period, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, the Restoration, neoclassicism, romanticism, Victorian Age, and the twentieth-century and contemporary literary backgrounds. The reader of these volumes will acquire the knowledge of literary terminology along with the theoretical and critical perspectives on certain texts and textual typology belonging to different periods, movements, trends, and genres. The reader will also learn about the characteristics and conventions of these literary periods and movements, trends and genres, main writers and major works, and the literary interaction and continuity of the given periods. Apart from an important amount of reference to literary practice, some chapters on these periods include information on their philosophy, criticism, worldview, values, or episteme, in the Foucauldian sense, which means that even though the condition of the creative writing remains as the main concern, it is balanced by a focus on the condition of thought as well as theoretical and critical writing during a particular period. Preface Introduction: Approaching Literary Practice and Studying British Literature in History Preliminaries: Learning Literary Heritage through Critical Tradition or Back to Tynyanov Genre Theory for Poetry The Intellectual Background 1.1 The Period and Its Historical, Social and Cultural Implications 1.2 The Philosophical Advancement of Modernity 1.2.1 Francis Bacon and the “New Method” 1.2.2 The Advancement of Classicism: French Contribution 1.2.3 The Social and Political Philosophy: Thomas Hobbes and Leviathan 1.2.4 Rationalists and Empiricists 1.3 The Idea of Literature as a Critical Concern in the Seventeenth Century 1.3.1 The English “Battle of the Books” or “La Querelle des Anciens et des Modernes” in the European Context 1.3.2 Restoration, John Dryden and Prescribing Neoclassicism The Literary Background 2.1 The British Seventeenth Century and Its Literary Practice 2.2 Metaphysical Poetry, Its Alternatives and Aftermath 2.3 The Puritan Period and Its Literary Expression 2.4 The Restoration Period and Its Literature 2.5 The Picaresque Tradition in European and English Literature Major Literary Voices 3.1 The Metaphysical Poets I: John Donne 3.2 The Metaphysical Poets II: George Herbert 3.3 The Metaphysical Poets III: Andrew Marvell 3.4 John Milton: The Voice of the Century 3.4.1 L’Allegro and Il Penseroso 3.4.2 Lycidas and Sonnets 3.4.3 Paradise Lost and the Epic of Puritanism 3.5 John Dryden and His Critical Theory and Literary Practice Conclusion: The Literature of a Turbulent Age References and Suggestions for Further Reading Index

Hundreds of writers in the English-speaking world of the seventeenth-century imagined alternative ideal societies. Sometimes they did so by exploring fanciful territories, such as the world in the moon or the nations of the Antipodes; but sometimes they composed serious disquisitions about the here and now, proposing how England or its nascent colonies could be conceived of as an 'Oceana,' or a New Jerusalem. This book provides a comprehensive view of the operations of the utopian imagination in literature from 1603 to the 1660s. Appealing to social theorists, literary critics, and political and cultural historians, this volume revises prevailing notions of the languages of hope and social dreaming in the making of British modernity during a century of political and intellectual upheaval.

Cervantes in Seventeenth-century England garners well over a thousand English references to Cervantes and his works, thus providing the fullest and most intriguing early English picture ever made of the writings of Spain's greatest writer. Besides references to the nineteen books of Cervantes's prose available to seventeenth-century English readers (including four little-known abridgments), this new volume includes entries by such notable writers as Ben Jonson, John Fletcher, William Wycherley, Aphra Behn, Thomas Hobbes, John Dryden, and John Locke, as well as many lesser-known and anonymous writers. A reader will find, among others, a counterfeiter, a midwife, an astrologer, a princess, a diarist, and a Harvard graduate. Altogether this broad range of writers, famed and forgotten alike, brings to light not only sectarian and political tensions of the day, but also glimpses of the arts-of weaving, singing, acting, engraving, and painting. Even dancing, for there was a dance called the "Sancho Panzo". The volume opens with a wide-ranging Introduction that among other things traces the English reception of both Cervantes's Don Quixote and his Novelas ejemplares, including the part they played in English drama. In the main body of the work, individual items are arranged chronologically by year and, within that framework, alphabetically by author, thus providing little-known seventeenth-century evidence regarding the nature and breadth of British interest in Cervantes in various decades. Thorough annotation helps readers to place individual entries in their historical, social, political, and in some instances religious contexts. The volume includes twenty-nine germane seventeenth-century pictures, an index of references to chapters in Don Quixote, and a full bibliography and index.

This ambitious undertaking is designed to acquaint students, teachers, and researchers with reference sources in any branch of English studies, which Marcuse defines as "all those subjects and lines of critical and scholarly inquiry presently pursued by members of university departments of English language and literature.'' Within each of 24 major sections, Marcuse lists and annotates bibliographies, guides, reviews of research, encyclopedias, dictionaries, journals, and reference histories. The annotations and various indexes are models of clarity and usefulness, and cross references are liberally supplied where appropriate. Although cost-conscious librarians will probably consider the several other excellent literary bibliographies in print, such as James L. Harner's Literary Research Guide (Modern Language Assn. of America, 1989), larger academic libraries will want Marcuse's volume.-- Jack Bales, Mary Washington Coll. Lib., Fredericksburg, Va. -Library Journal.

Twenty-six new essays by experts on seventeenth-century thought provide a critical survey of this key period in British intellectual history. These far-reaching essays discuss not only central debates and canonical authors from Francis Bacon to Isaac Newton, but also explore less well-known figures and topics from the period.