Digressive Voices in Early Modern English Literature

by Anne Cotterill

Overview

Cotterill turns feminist sensitivity toward silenced voices to look afresh at major nondramatic texts by Donne, Marvell, Browne, Milton, and Dryden. Anne Cotterill examines richly digressive speakers who carve literary mazes through a dangerous world for psychological, political, and poetic survival—and attack.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780199261178
Publisher:	Oxford University Press
Publication date:	05/06/2004
Pages:	352
Product dimensions:	8.60(w) x 5.70(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

Rutgers University

Table of Contents

Introduction1. Breathless: Digression and Survival in 1 Henry VI2. 'Motion in Corruption': Digression and Descent in Donne's Anniversaries3. Marvell's Watery Maze: Digression and Discovery at Nun Appleton4. Sounding 'Wisdom's Way': Digression and Delay in Paradise Lost5. Parenthesis at the Center: Digression and Mystery in The Hind and the Panther6. The Devious Progress of Satire: Digression and Vengeance in Dryden's Late Preface7. Dislocation, Dipossession, and the Voice Come Home: An Epilogue on the 'Modern' DigressionBibliographyIndex

Editorial Reviews

"Cotterill has written a splendid book that reflects her engagement with the seventeenth century across the Resoration divide. Her formal sensitivity to both language and rhetoric and her deft positioning of the individual texts within the trajectory of their writers' careers make each chapter memorable." — Modern Philology

"This welcome book deftly dismantles period divisions and offers a new angle on the relation between poetry, literary writing, and politics. Cotterill emphasizes the pleasures and intricacies of the literary text in her compelling readings."—Studies in English Literature 1500-1900

From the Publisher