The Oxford History of Poetry in English

Abstract

Abstract By taking as its purview the full seventeenth century, 1603–1700, this volume re-draws the existing literary historical map and expands upon recent rethinking of the canon. Placing the revolutionary years at the centre of a century of poetic transformation, and putting the Restoration back into seventeenth-century literary history, the volume registers the transformative effects on poetic forms of a century of social, political, and religious upheaval. It considers the achievements of a number of women poets, not yet fully integrated into traditional literary histories. It assimilates the vibrant literature of the English Revolution to what came before and after, registering its long-term impact. It traces the development of print culture and of the literary marketplace, alongside the continued circulation of poetry in manuscript. It places John Milton, Andrew Marvell, Margaret Cavendish, Katherine Philips, and other mid-century poets into the full century of specifically literary development. It traces continuity and change, imitation and innovation in the full-century trajectory of such poetic genres as sonnet, elegy, satire, georgic, epigram, ode, devotional lyric, and epic. The volume’s attention to poetic form builds on the current upswing in historicist formalism, allowing a close focus on poetry as an intensely aesthetic and social literary mode. Designed for maximum classroom utility, the organisation of volume is both thematic and (in the authors’ section) chronological. After a comprehensive Introduction, organisational sections focus on Transitions; Materiality, Production, and Circulation; Poetics and Form; Genres; and Poets.