Aesthetics of Contingency: Writing, Politics, and Culture in England, 1639-89

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. -- .

Matthew C. Augustine is a Lecturer in the School of English at the University of St Andrews -- .

'For a work concerned to muddy critical waters, Aesthetics of Contingency is admirably clear, and its arguments broadly convincing.' Taylor & Francis Online 'Aesthetics of Contingency is admirably clear, and its arguments broadly convincing. Augustine's study is a salutary reminder of something too often overlooked: that poets and writers did not usually consider themselves ambassadors for the ideals of whatever literary period posterity has since consigned them to - and that the contingencies of history always blind writers in any given moment to the outcomes of a future that seems to us so self-evident.' The Seventeenth Century -- .