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

This book explores the literary responses to the civil conflicts and enduring crises of Stuart governance in the 17th century, challenging traditional narratives and proposing a fresh perspective through contextual analysis, close reading, and critical theory.

Format: Hardback
Length: 288 pages
Publication date: 01 June 2018
Publisher: Manchester University Press

This new study raises fundamental questions about the nature of imaginative writing in the age of 'Englands 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 Drydens 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.

This new study raises fundamental questions about the nature of imaginative writing in the age of 'Englands 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 Drydens 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.

Weight: 468g
Dimension: 147 x 224 x 26 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781526100764