This collection of writings by English Renaissance poets and essayists includes poems and essays by Ben Jonson, George Chapman and Samuel Daniel. Excerpts from Francis Bacon, John Milton, William Drummond, George Herbert, Andrew Marvell, Abraham Cowley. The book also surveys the origins, range and development of literary taste and practice in 16th and 17th century England. Then, as now, poets anchored their lines between the poles of tradition and inspiration, loyalty and liberty, art and truth. Edward W. Tayler is the emeritus Lionel trilling Professor in the Humanities at Columbia University. His other books include Nature and Art in the Renaissance, Milton Poetry, and Donne Idea of a Woman. p> he selection is excellent?The introduction is most admirable and ?Tayler wisely is generous with explanations and identifications?His most volume supplants Sringarn as THE best collection of seventeenth-century criticism.?/p> Seventeenth-Century News Winter 1967

This study tries, through a systematic and historical analysis of the concept of critical authority, to write a history of literary criticism from the end of the 17th to the end of the 18th century that not only takes the discursive construction of its (self)representation into account, but also the social and economic conditions of its practice. It tries to consider the whole of the critical discourse on literature and criticism in the time period covered. Thus, it is distinctive through its methodology (there is no systematic account of the historical development of critical authority and no discussion of the institutionalization of criticism of such a scope), its material of analysis (most of the many hundred texts self-reflexively commenting on criticism that are discussed here have been so far virtually ignored) and through its results, a complex history of criticism in the 18th century that is neither reductive nor the accumulation of isolated aspects or author figures, but that probes into the very nature of the activity of criticism. The aim of this study is both to provide a thorough historical understanding of the emergence of criticism and as a consequence an understanding of the inner workings and power relations that structure criticism to this day.

Examining seventeenth-century crises of evidence and genres of evidence on which both literary critics and historians now depend, True Relations explores the notion that we apprehend truth through other people's relations of it and that those relations, and our own relation to them, are a function of social relationships in conflict.

A History of Seventeenth-Century Literature outlines significant developments in the English literary tradition between the years 1603 and 1690. An energetic and provocative history of English literature from 1603-1690. Part of the major Blackwell History of English Literature series. Locates seventeenth-century English literature in its social and cultural contexts. Considers the physical conditions of literary production and consumption. Looks at the complex political, religious, cultural and social pressures on seventeenth-century writers. Features close critical engagement with major authors and texts Thomas Corns is a major international authority on Milton, the Caroline Court, and the political literature of the English Civil War and the Interregnum.

Twenty-nine poets writing from the 1603 ascension of James I, the first Stuart King, and the Restoration of the monarchy in 1660, are included in this Norton Critical Edition.

The seventeenth century was a period of immense turmoil. This book explores the methods by which a distinctive iconography was created for each Stuart king, describes the cultural life of the Civil War period and the Cromwellian Protectorate, and analyses the impact of the antiquarian movement which constructed a new sense of national identity. Through this detailed and fascinating discussion of seventeenth-century society, Graham Parry provides a clear insight into the many forces operating on the literature of the period.

This book argues that play offered Hamlet, John Donne, George Herbert, Andrew Marvell, Robert Burton, and Sir Thomas Browne a way to live within the contradictions and conflicts of late Renaissance life by providing a new stance for the self. Grounding its argument in recent theories of play and in a historical analysis that sees the seventeenth century as a point of crisis in the formation of the western self, the author demonstrates how play helped mediate this crisis and how central texts of the period enact this mediation.