A study of how literature responds to conditions of political uncertainty, this book rewrites much of what we thought we knew about civil war and Restoration literature. Rather than sparking a decisive break with the past, for many the seventeenth-century’s civil wars opened onto a resolutely indeterminate future.

Introduction: remapping early modern literature1. ‘He saw a greater Sun appear’: waiting for the apocalypse in Milton’s Poems 16452. ‘We goe to heaven against each others wills’: revising Religio Medici in the English Revolution3. ‘But Iconoclastes drawn in little’: making and unmaking a Whig Marvell4. ‘It had an odde promiscuous tone’: Lord Rochester and Restoration modernity5. ‘Transprosing and Transversing’: religion, revolution, and the end of history in Dryden’s late works6. CodaIndex

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.