The Oxford Handbook of Andrew Marvell by Martin Dzelzainis, E... - 9780198736400

Oxford University Press

The Oxford Handbook of Andrew Marvell is the most comprehensive and informative collection of essays ever assembled dealing with the life and writings of the poet and politician Andrew Marvell (162178). Like his friend and colleague John Milton, Marvell is now seen as a dominant figure in the literary landscape of the midseventeenth century, producing a stunning oeuvre of poetry and prose either side of the Restoration. In the 1640s and 1650s he was the author of hypercanonical lyrics like To His Coy Mistress and The Garden as well as three epochdefining poems about Oliver Cromwell. After 1660 he virtually invented the verse genre of state satire as well as becoming the most influential prose satirist of the dayin the process forging a longlived reputation as an incorruptible patriot. Although Marvell himself was an intensely private and selfcontained character, whose literary, religious, and political commitments are notoriously difficult to discern, the interdisciplinary contributions by an array of experts in the fields of seventeenthcentury literature, history, and politics gathered together in the Handbook constitute a decisive step forward in our understanding of him. They offer a fullyrounded account of his life and writings, individual readings of his key works, considerations of his relations with his major contemporaries, and surveys of his rich and varied afterlives. Informed by the wealth of editorial and biographical work on Marvell that has been produced in... | Oxford University Press Oxford Handbook of Andrew Marvell Hardcover