Contributors
Acknowledgements
Abbreviations
Introduction
Christopher D’Addario
Part I: Rethinking texts and readers
1 Impractical criticism: close reading and the contingencies of history
Michael Schoenfeldt
2 ‘Small portals’: Marvell’s Horatian Ode, print culture, and literary history
Joad Raymond
3 Marvell discovers the public sphere
Michael McKeon
4 Extraordinarily ordinary: Nehemiah Wallington’s experimental method
Kathleen Lynch
Part II: Rethinking context
5 A sense of place: historicism, whither wilt?
Christopher D’Addario
6 Understanding experience: subjectivity, sex, and suffering in early modern England
Derek Hirst
7 Debating censorship: liberty and press control in the 1640s
Randy Robertson
8 ‘Armed winter, and inverted day’: the politics of cold in Dryden and Purcell’s King Arthur
Anne Cotterill
Part III: Rethinking literary histories
9 The European Marvell
Nigel Smith
10 Waller, Tasso, and Marvell’s Last Instructions to a Painter
Timothy Raylor
11 Marvell’s personal elegy? Rewriting Shakespeare in A Poem upon the Death of O. C.
Alex Garganigo
12 How John Dryden read his Milton: The State of Innocence reconsidered
Matthew C. Augustine
Part IV: Afterword
On behalf of the Age of Andrew Marvell?
Steven N. Zwicker

Texts and readers in the Age of Marvell offers fresh perspectives from leading and emerging scholars of seventeenth-century British literature, focusing on the surprising ways that texts interacted with writers and readers at precise cultural moments. With particular interest in how texts entered the seventeenth-century public world, some of these essays emphasise the variety of motivations – from generic distaste to personal frustration – that explain how ideology and form fuse together in various works. Others offer fine-grained and multi-sided contextualisations of familiar texts and cruxes.

With an eye to the elusive and complicated Andrew Marvell as tutelary figure of the age, the contributors provide novel readings of a range of seventeenth-century authors, often foregrounding the complexities these writers faced as the remarkable events of the century moved swiftly around them. The essays make important contributions, both methodological and critical, to the field of early modern studies and include examinations of prominent seventeenth-century figures such as John Milton, Andrew Marvell, John Dryden and Edmund Waller. New work appears here by Nigel Smith and Michael McKeon on Marvell, Michael Schoenfeldt on new formalism, Derek Hirst on child abuse in the seventeenth century, and Joad Raymond on print politics.

Because of their relevance to contemporary critical debates, the studies here will be of interest to postgraduate students and scholars working on seventeenth-century British literature, culture and history.