Imagining Andrew Marvell at 400

Augustine, Pertile and Zwicker celebrate the work of Andrew Marvell (1621-1678) in the quatercentenary year of his birth, combining the best historical scholarship with a varied and ambitious programme of cognitive, affective, and aesthetic inquiry. The essays have been specially commissioned for the quatercentenary and include the work of a range of scholars from Britain and North America. Acknowledged masterpieces such as the 'Horatian Ode', 'The Garden', and 'Upon Appleton House' are here read in light of historical and material evidence that has emerged in recent decades. At the same time, the volume offers many fresh points of entry into Marvell's work, with particular attention to the poet's lyric economies, Marvell's engagement with popular print, and, not least, the polyglot and transnational dimensions of his writing. The quatercentenary also represents an important anniversary for Marvell studies, marking one hundred years since T. S. Eliot's appreciation of the poet inaugurated modern Marvell criticism. As Imagining Andrew Marvell at 400 reassesses Marvell's writings it also reflects on the profession of English literature, taking stock of the discipline itself, where it has been and where it might be going as scholars continue to map the pleasures and challenges of reading and re-reading Andrew Marvell.

1 - Introduction
2 - The Conversion of Andrew Marvell: Religion, Poetics, Sexuality
3 - Hollowing after Cromwell in 'The First Anniversary'
4 - 'Let Us Now Praise Famous Men': Andrew Marvell and the Problem of Panegyric
5 - 'Business Either of Truth or Eternity': Marvell's View from 1672
6 - 'A Fleet of Worlds': Marvell, Globalisation, and Slavery
7 - Marvell and Bilingual Verse Culture
8 - Marvell and the Abrupt Style,
9 - Maritime Mirrors: Marvell's Dutch Satires
10 - Marvell and the Poetics of Creation
11 - 'The World Excluding Round': Suspended Passions and Alienated Affects in Marvell's Lyric Poetry
12 - Knowingness and Eros: Andrew Marvell's 'Last Instructions to a Painter'
13 - 'Contained' and 'Unconstrained': Andrew Marvell and the Signs of Sound
14 - The River Overflows: Consciousness in 'Upon Appleton House'
15 - Marvell's Poetry in Motion
16 - Touching Words: Marvell's Satires in Hand
17 - Practising Flow in Marvell and Ashbery
18 - Learning to Read with Marvell
19 - Hold or Break: Andrew Marvell, Poetry, and Necessity

Matthew C. Augustine teaches early modern literature at the University of St Andrews. A past president of the Andrew Marvell Society, his major publications include Aesthetics of Contingency: Writing, Politics, and Culture in England, 1639-89 (2018) and Andrew Marvell: A Literary Life (2021). With Steven Zwicker, he is co-editor of Lord Rochester in the Restoration World (2015) and of the forthcoming Oxford Handbook of Restoration Literature. Giulio J. Pertile is Lecturer in early modern literature at the University of St. Andrews. His first book, Feeling Faint: Affect and Consciousness in the Renaissance was published by Northwestern University Press in 2019. His articles have appeared in English Literary Renaissance, Shakespeare Quarterly, The Seventeenth Century and elsewhere. He is currently writing a new book on the poetics of Creation in the Renaissance, from Du Bartas and Tasso to Milton and Hutchinson. Steven N. Zwicker teaches early modern literature at Washington University; he has published on Milton, Marvell, Rochester, and Dryden; written collaboratively with Matthew Augustine, Derek Hirst, and Kevin Sharpe; and, most recently, edited John Dryden: Selected Works for the 21st-Century Oxford Authors series.