The years 1660 to 1714 represent a fraught transitional period, one caught between two now dominant periodization rubrics: early modern and the long eighteenth century. Containing narratives of disruption, restoration, and reconfiguration, Emergent Nation: Early Modern British Literature in Transition, 1660–1714 explores the conjunctions and disjunctions between historical and literary developments in this period, when the sociable, rivalrous textual world of letters registered and accelerated changes. Each of the volume's four parts highlights the relationship of various literary forms to a different kind of transformation - generic, ideological, cultural, or local. The five chapters in each section rigorously probe the conditions that affected the period's literary transformations, and interrogate the traditions that canonical and less established writers inherited, adapted, and often challenged. In making a case for an early mimetically produced English nation, this book, through its concentration on literary evidence and transitions also makes innovative contributions to an understanding of nationalism in the period.

During the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, England grew from a marginal to a major European power, established overseas settlements, and negotiated the Protestant Reformation. The population burgeoned and became increasingly urban. England also saw the meteoric rise of commercial theatre in London, the creation of a vigorous market for printed texts, and the emergence of writing as a viable profession. Literacy rates exploded, and an increasingly diverse audience encountered a profusion of new textual forms. Media, and literary culture, transformed on a scale that would not happen again until television and the Internet. The twenty innovative contributions in Gathering Force: Early Modern Literature in Transition, 1557–1623 trace ways that five different genres both spurred and responded to change. Chapters explore different facets of lyric poetry, romance, commercial drama, masques and pageants, and non-narrative prose. Exciting and accessible, this volume illuminates the dynamic relationships among the period's social, political, and literary transformations.

"The Novel Stage: Narrative Form from the Restoration to Jane Austen traces the novel's relation to the theater over the course of the long eighteenth century, arguing that the familiar account of the novel as 'new' and distinct from other literary genres risks distorting a true reckoning of the form by failing to engage with the borrowings and departures from other more familiar genres, particularly drama. The Novel Stage traces the migration of tragicomedy, the comedy of manners, and melodrama from the stage to the novel. These genres were shared across print and performance, media that were not construed as opposites in a world in which individual silent reading took place beside playgoing, play-reading, amateur theatricals, and sociable reading aloud. The book thus expands an overly narrow conception of the novel as the genre of realism or domesticity whose highest achievement is its representation of characters' mental lives by describing the influence of the stage and its genres. Beginning in the later 1600s with Aphra Behn, The Novel Stage concludes with a chapter on some novelists of the Romantic period and a coda about Victorian novels. The Novel Stage's account of the novel provides an enriched, because more specific, sense of its formal accomplishments that drew on this ensemble of cultural forms and turns that lens back onto drama"--Provided by publisher.

The Oxford Handbook of Restoration Literature begins by asking if there was a distinctive literature of the Restoration. For a long time, the answer seemed obvious: heroic drama, libertine comedy, scandalous lyrics, and the short but brilliant career of John Wilmot, earl of Rochester. Could there be an age when the coincidence of literary culture and political rule were any more obvious? But as this Handbook will remind us, some of the most wonderful literature of this Restoration came from writers who had lived across the decades of turbulence and into an age when the Stuart kings returned, when the Church and House of Lords were restored, a world made safe for bishops and for the memory of divine right rule. Of course, these returns and restorations did not meet with uniform celebration. John Milton wrote his great epic poems not in quiet submission but in a kind of resistance to the dominant culture of the 1660s, and Andrew Marvell produced his most brilliant satiric verse by holding up a looking glass to court corruption and Anglican intolerance. So we begin with the most obvious conclusion: Restoration literature does and does not fit to the categories that so long defined the late Stuart age. This book explores and contests, challenges and reimagines the experience embodied by the writing of the late Stuart world and invites readers new to this world and those who have often read its literatures to the pleasures but as well to the challenges and discomforts of its texts.

Beginning with the last years of the reign of Elizabeth I and ending late in the seventeenth century, this volume traces the growth of the literary marketplace, the development of poetic genres, and the participation of different writers in a century of poetic continuity, change, and transformation.

The Oxford History of Poetry in English (OHOPE) is designed to offer a fresh, multi-voiced, and comprehensive analysis of 'poetry': from Anglo-Saxon culture through contemporary British, Irish, American, and Global culture, including English, Scottish, and Welsh poetry, Anglo-American colonial and post-colonial poetry, and poetry in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the Caribbean, India, Africa, Asia, and other international locales. OHOPE both synthesizes existing scholarship and presents cutting-edge research, employing a global team of expert contributors for each of the fourteen volumes. By taking as its purview the full seventeenth century, 1603-1700, this volume re-draws the existing literary historical map and expands upon recent rethinking of the canon. Placing the revolutionary years at the centre of a century of poetic transformation, and putting the Restoration back into the seventeenth century, the volume registers the transformative effects on poetic forms of a century of social, political, and religious upheaval. It considers the achievements of a number of women poets, not yet fully integrated into traditional literary histories. It assimilates the vibrant literature of the English Revolution to what came before and after, registering its long-term impact. It traces the development of print culture and of the literary marketplace, alongside the continued circulation of poetry in manuscript. It places John Milton, Andrew Marvell, Margaret Cavendish, and Katherine Philips and other mid-century poets into the full century of specifically literary development. It traces continuity and change, imitation and innovation in the full-century trajectory of such poetic genres as sonnet, elegy, satire, georgic, epigram, ode, devotional lyric, and epic. The volume's attention to poetic form builds on the current upswing in historicist formalism, allowing a close focus on poetry as an intensely aesthetic and social literary mode. Designed for maximum classroom utility, the organization is both thematic and (in the authors section) chronological. After a comprehensive Introduction, organizational sections focus on Transitions; Materiality, Production, and Circulation; Poetics and Form; Genres; and Poets.