Aesthetics of Contingency
Subtitle: Writing, Politics and Culture in England, 1639-89
Publisher: Manchester University Press
Published: 2016
Language: eng
Number of pages: 288
ISBN-13: 9781526100764
Subjects: English literature, history and criticism, early modern, 1500-1700; Politics in literature; Politics and culture; Great britain, history, stuarts, 1603-1714
Description: This new study raises fundamental questions about the nature of imaginative writing in the age of 'England's troubles'. Drawing energy from recent debates in Stuart history, this book looks past the traditional watersheds of Restoration and Revolution, plotting the responsiveness of seventeenth-century writers to the tremors of civil conflict and to the enduring crises and contradictions of Stuart governance. Augustine draws freely from the insights and strategies of contextual analysis, close reading, and critical theory in a bid to defamiliarise major texts of the period, from the poetry of young Milton to the brilliant works of adaptation, translation, and bricolage that characterised Dryden's last decade. Muting the antagonisms and conflicts that have dominated previous accounts, Aesthetics of contingency thus proposes to write the literary history of this period anew.