Royalists and Royalism in 17th-Century Literature
Subtitle: Exploring Abraham Cowley
Series: Routledge Studies in Renaissance Literature and Culture; Routledge studies in Renaissance literature and culture
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2019
Place of publication: New York
Language: eng
Number of pages: 295
ISBN-13: 9781000711837; 9780367808129; 9781000711981; 9781000712131; 9780367406349
Subjects: Criticism and interpretation; LITERARY CRITICISM; General
Description: Author of plays, love-lyrics, essays and, among other works, The Civil War, the Davideis and the Pindarique Odes, Abraham Cowley made a deep impression on seventeenth-century letters, attested by his extravagant funeral and his burial next to Chaucer and Spenser in Westminster Abbey. Ejected from Cambridge for his politics, he found refuge in royalist Oxford before seeing long service as secretary to Queen Henrietta Maria, and as a Crown agent, on the continent. In the mid-1650s he returned to England, was imprisoned and made an accommodation with the Cromwellian regime. This volume of essays provides the modern critical attention Cowley's life and writings merit.
Notes: Philip Major is the author of Writings of Exile in the English Revolution and Restoration (Routledge, 2013). He has edited collections of essays on the literature of seventeenth-century exile, Thomas Killigrew, John Denham, Clarendon, and (with Andrew Hopper) Thomas Fairfax. He has also written a number of articles and chapters on seventeenth-century literature.
Table of contents: title: Cover; Half Title; Series Page; Title Page; Copyright Page; Contents; List of Figures; List of Contributors; Acknowledgements; Abbreviations; Introduction; 1 Abraham Cowley and Print: Paratexts and Contexts; 2 Laurels for the Conquered: Cowley, Epic, and History; 3 Generic Dialogue and the Sublime in Cowley: Epic, Didactic, Pindaric; 4 Cowley's Epic Experiments; 5 Abraham Cowley and the English Literary Canon; 6 Abraham Cowley's 1656 Poems: Form and Context; 7 The Fruits of Retirement: Political Engagement in the Plantarum Libri Sex; 8 Sacred and Secular in Cowley's Essays; title: 9 'An Old and Unfashionable Building': Cowley's Dramatic Writing and Rewriting10 'The Pindarick Way': Cowley's Pindarics and the English Libretto; Index