Christopher D'Addario, Exile and Journey in Seventeenth-Century LiteratureExile and Journey in Seventeenth-Century Literature. ChristopherD'Addario. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Pp. v+199.

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Previous articleNext article FreeBook ReviewChristopher D'Addario, Exile and Journey in Seventeenth-Century Literature Exile and Journey in Seventeenth-Century Literature. Christopher D'Addario. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Pp. v+199.Anne CotterillAnne CotterillMissouri University of Science and Technology Search for more articles by this author Missouri University of Science and TechnologyPDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreChristopher D'Addario examines the largely neglected impact on early modern literary culture of the experiences of exile of English men and women across the seventeenth century, when England was torn by competing ideologies, civil war, regicide, and three radical changes of leadership. He illuminates how the complex psychological and material experience of exile, of “being moved to the margins of the English-speaking world, either geographically, politically or religiously” (3), shaped much seventeenth-century writing, from lyric and epic to translation, including such canonic texts as Hobbes's Leviathan (1651) and Milton's Paradise Lost (1667). D'Addario carefully distinguishes his use of the term “exile,” which includes the possibility of the “interior exile” (politically disfranchised but not expatriated), from any romantic notion of the alienated intellectual or voluntary migrant. The texts studied here—Nathaniel Ward's The Simple Cobbler of Aggawam (1647), Anne Bradstreet's The Tenth Muse Lately SprungUp in America (1650), Hobbes's Leviathan, Milton's Paradise Lost, and Dryden's translation of Virgil's Aeneid (1697)—share “a particular set of circumstances and a particular rhetorical and affective mode” and “arise out of similar experiences of displacement and marginalization” (19), specifically that of the loss of a world the exiled person had known until recently, which can happen even when the writer is not forced to leave his or her native country. Addressed to the widest possible audience in the homeland, these texts were published and sold through the print market of metropolitan London. Their publication allowed the writers their only way back to the center of England's reading culture. Hence, Exile and Journey not only builds on and extends the work of theoreticians of exile, like Edward Said and Michael Seidel, and of the postcolonial and transatlantic diaspora, such as Paul Gilroy and Homi Bhabha, but also is indebted to the perspective of material studies. The latter emphasizes the importance of the material world that the exiled writers have lost yet remain connected to through memory and the “material specifics of the English book trade circa 1650–1700,” which produced the physical book and literary event so important to the writers' self-fashioning in exile (13).These writers share a continued engagement with their homeland, nostalgia for a world or way of life they have not only lost but seen derided, and a vehement nationalism that locates the deepest values of England and Englishness in their work (20). To displace the center to their margins, all turn to history, reaching back to a past through which they can reread the present and construct a history that, polemically, “refigures the exiles as central, as the saving remnants of an English nation hopelessly astray” (11). Yet even as these texts reflect the need to create a space in which the author can operate in full control, a sense of the provisional nature of that imagined space remains. The writers never manage to elide completely the experience of distance from their culture.Exile and Journey moves chronologically as it considers two kinds of seventeenth-century exile: those who left England, either temporarily or permanently, and those who remained in London under censorship and other restrictions. The first chapters treat geographic exiles and their work published around midcentury in response to England's civil war—specifically, religious exiles Nathaniel Ward and Anne Bradstreet in Massachusetts and political exile Thomas Hobbes in France. D'Addario reads Ward's Simple Cobbler and Bradstreet's Tenth Muse as transatlantic works closely connected to the English Puritan community, written from a religious tradition whose roots lay in the experiences of the continental Marian exiles. Both Ward and Bradstreet turn nostalgically to the Elizabethan era for a voice to speak with, commuting physical into temporal distance that allows them to make rhetorical use of the figure of the “rustic author,” the “simple outsider” that purports to be more honest and purely English than the authorities in the homeland. Ward borrows from the extravagant voice of Martin Marprelate to create a fiery language for attacking “toleration, the New Model Army and King Charles” (42), while behind the cover of her homespun persona, Bradstreet re-creates “an elegiac Elizabethan poetic world” in elegies to Sir Philip Sidney, Queen Elizabeth, and French Renaissance poet Du Bartas, which attempt to redraw “the lineage of English poetry and history to include the displaced author” (43–44). On the other side of the Atlantic, the destitute nature of the English exile community in Paris during the captivity and execution of Charles I, argues D'Addario, colored Hobbes's vision of a dispersed, warring humanity in a state of nature. Tracing Hobbes's sensitivity to the connections between political and linguistic disorder back to his earliest work (73), D'Addario suggests that the experience of exile only heightened Hobbes's nervousness about the fixity of language and political community—hence his firm control in Leviathan over the meaning of contested words and phrases, which he presents as objective truth, just as the sovereign in his vision is the arbiter of meaning (84).The third and fourth chapters on the experience of interior exiles John Milton and John Dryden form an especially compelling unit. Each writer lost his civil service position and the political and religious freedom he had known as a voice of government, Milton in 1660 and Dryden in 1688, and each moved to and wrote from the geographic and political margins of London. Although in the Restoration the Puritan republican and Stuart laureate were defending different politics and aesthetics, with another turn of the wheel Dryden, like Milton, would spend his final years in political and religious marginalization in meditation on epic, usurping monarchs, and the home within. D'Addario argues that Milton anticipated and strategically directed Paradise Lost, with its rhetoric of epic sublimity and transcendent vision and its compendium of learning and dramatic story, to a broad range of contemporary readers in 1667, when many were disillusioned with the sexual and political corruption of Charles II and his court and their libertine taste in theater. Like those writing in exile from another country, Milton, though in London, turned his restricted position into a vantage from which he claimed to see more clearly and deeply than those at the center of power and to speak with greater authority. The proliferation of epic in the seventeenth century—the incomplete royalist epics of William Davenant and Abraham Cowley, Richard Fanshawe's translation of the Luciads, Paradise Lost, Dryden's translation of the Aeneid (one might add Lucy Hutchinson's Order and Disorder)—suggests how epic, simultaneously “authoritative, elevated, and nationalist” (109), became a natural vehicle for writing from the political margins. But Paradise Lost, which begins and ends confronting the shock of exile, never completely resolves the writer's tension between authoritative self-assertion and the uncertainty of disillusion and loss (108); in D'Addario's view, the moments in which the poem draws attention to its inconsistencies and difficulties of expression sound a familiar theme in these texts from exile of the ultimately provisional nature of all imaginative structures (119). By 1688, when the Stuarts were banished and Dryden had lost his posts of laureate and historiographer royal, his publisher, Jacob Tonson, produced a monumental edition of Paradise Lost, with a set of plates and with dedicatory lines by Dryden that elevate yet distance Milton as a “classical poet” in the company of Homer and Virgil. In his long preface to translations of Juvenal and Persius (1692), Dryden would praise Milton for translating Homer's “Grecisms” and Virgil's “Elegancies,” eliding the work of English epic and of translation with which Dryden would labor and through which he meditated on literary inheritance and transmutation until he died (125). In his remarkable achievement of the complete Virgil in the 1690s, Dryden not only rethought his complex relationship to the classical poet he had called early in his career his “master” but also “constructed a complex and multivalent public voice in his Dedication to the Aeneis that…read Virgil as a disappointed republican publicly writing for the good of Augustan Rome” (130). Dryden's Dedication depicts “a reluctant” and “resistant” Virgil but a poet in control of his art, writing epic as a delicate balancing act of interior exile: Virgil, like Dryden himself, becomes a touchstone of virtue mediating between people and prince (135). Like the other exiled writers in this book, Dryden turns to history and print to translate disfranchisement into a voice of authority for the present.The concision, subtlety, and quiet elegance of Exile and Journey downplay the range and depth of the author's scholarship and the originality of his vision, one that crosses the Atlantic and the long seventeenth century to bring together in an important relation texts and experiences, from the Massachusetts Puritan community to the heart of Restoration England. Christopher D'Addario's valuable book allows us to grasp the traumatic experience of displacement for religious and political beliefs in the seventeenth century and, in the process, to appreciate anew some of the central texts of our literary tradition. Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Modern Philology Volume 109, Number 1August 2011 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/660751 Views: 52Total views on this site © 2011 by The University of Chicago. 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