John Wilmot, the Earl of Rochester

John Wilmot, second Earl of Rochester (1647-80), was a leading member of the group of `court wits' surrounding Charles II. One of the wittiest and most sexually explicit poets in English, his poems circulated principally in manuscript, which makes the tracing of their transmissional history a peculiarly difficult task. In this long-awaited edition, Harold Love, one of the leading scholars of seventeenth-century manuscript circulation, presents a scholarly text based on detailed examination of the manuscripts, with full textual and explanatory notes. It will be an important contribution to the study of manuscript publication as well as a vital resource for all students of Rochester.

The Critical Heritage gathers together a large body of critical sources on major figures in literature. Each volume presents contemporary repsonses to a writer's work, enabling student and researcher to read the material themselves.

This book examines the role of scepticism in initiating the idea of the sublime in early modern British literature. James Noggle draws on philosophy, intellectual history, and critical theory to illuminate the aesthetic ideology of Pope, Swift, Dryden, and Rochester among other important writers of the period. The Skeptical Sublime compares the view of sublimity presented by these authors with that of the dominant, liberal tradition of eighteenth-century criticism to offer a new understanding of how these writers helped construct proto-aesthetic categories that stabilized British culture after years of civil war and revolution, while at the same time their scepticism allowed them to express ambivalence about the emerging social order.

In this extraordinary and bold book, S.H. Clark explores and constructs a history of poetic misogyny. For the first time, a wide range of English poetry by men is examined for evidence of the articulation of heterosexual masculine desires. But Clark goes beyond a straightforward oppositional model of reading the male canon, to ask how we read this work 'after feminism', and whether it is possible to value these texts as misogynist texts in the light of feminist theory? Sordid Images is a challenging, controversial book. It will excite and unsettle its readers, and inspire many to look again at some of the cornerstone works of English literature.

This book examines how English writers from the Elizabethan period to the Restoration transformed and contested the ancient ideal of the virtuous mean. As early modern authors learned at grammar school and university, Aristotle and other classical thinkers praised "golden means" balanced between extremes: courage, for example, as opposed to cowardice or recklessness. By uncovering the enormous variety of English responses to this ethical doctrine, Joshua Scodel revises our understanding of the vital interaction between classical thought and early modern literary culture.Scodel argues that English authors used the ancient schema of means and extremes in innovative and contentious ways hitherto ignored by scholars. Through close readings of diverse writers and genres, he shows that conflicting representations of means and extremes figured prominently in the emergence of a self-consciously modern English culture. Donne, for example, reshaped the classical mean to promote individual freedom, while Bacon held extremism necessary for human empowerment. Imagining a modern rival to ancient Rome, georgics from Spenser to Cowley exhorted England to embody the mean or lauded extreme paths to national greatness. Drinking poetry from Jonson to Rochester expressed opposing visions of convivial moderation and drunken excess, while erotic writing from Sidney to Dryden and Behn pitted extreme passion against the traditional mean of conjugal moderation. Challenging his predecessors in various genres, Milton celebrated golden means of restrained pleasure and self-respect. Throughout this groundbreaking study, Scodel suggests how early modern treatments of means and extremes resonate in present-day cultural debates.

The 17th century was a time of significant cultural and political change. The era saw the rise of exploration and travel, the growth of the scientific method, and the spread of challenges to conventional religion. Many of these developments occurred in England and North America, and literature of the period reflects the intellectual and emotional fervor of the age. This reference chronicles the lives and works of more than 75 British and American writers of the 17th century.