Aesthetics of Contingency Writing, Politics, and Culture in England, 1639–89
Produktdetaljer
Biographical note
Matthew C. Augustine is a Lecturer in the School of English at the University of St Andrews<p>'For a work concerned to muddy critical waters, <i>Aesthetics of Contingency</i> is admirably clear, and its arguments broadly convincing.'<br />Taylor & Francis Online<br /><br />'<i>Aesthetics of Contingency</i> is admirably clear, and its arguments broadly convincing. Augustine’s study is a salutary reminder of something too often overlooked: that poets and writers did not usually consider themselves ambassadors for the ideals of whatever literary period posterity has since consigned them to – and that the contingencies of history always blind writers in any given moment to the outcomes of a future that seems to us so self-evident.' <br />The Seventeenth Century</p>
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Introduction: remapping early modern literature
1. ‘He saw a greater Sun appear’: waiting for the apocalypse in Milton’s Poems 1645
2. ‘We goe to heaven against each others wills’: revising Religio Medici in the English Revolution
3. ‘But Iconoclastes drawn in little’: making and unmaking a Whig Marvell
4. ‘It had an odde promiscuous tone’: Lord Rochester and Restoration modernity
5. ‘Transprosing and Transversing’: religion, revolution, and the end of history in Dryden’s late works
6. Coda
Index
Aesthetics of contingency provides an important reconsideration of seventeenth-century literature in light of new understandings of the English past. Emphasising the contingency of the political in revolutionary England and its extended aftermath, Matthew Augustine challenges prevailing literary histories plotted according to structural conflicts and teleological narrative. In their place, he offers an innovative account of imaginative and polemical writing, in an effort to view later seventeenth-century literature on its own terms: without certainty about the future or, indeed, the recent past. One consequence of hewing to this premise is that the familiar outline of the period – with red lines drawn at 1642, 1660, or 1688 – becomes suggestively blurred. For all of Milton’s prophetic gestures, for all of Dryden’s presumption to speak for, to epitomise his Age, writing from the later decades of the seventeenth century remained supremely responsive to uncertainty, to the tremors of civil conflict, and to the enduring crises and contradictions of Stuart governance.
A study of major writings from the Personal Rule to the Glorious Revolution and beyond, this book also re-examines the material conditions of literature in this age. By carefully deciphering the multi-layered forces at work in acts of writing and reception, and with due consideration for the forms in which texts were cast, Augustine explores the complex nature of making meaning in and making meaning out of later Stuart England.
Of interest to students of seventeenth-century literature, politics, and religion, Aesthetics of contingency promises to transform how we imagine the shape of early modern literary history.