Tracing the demonstrative aesthetic shift in literary writings of fashionable London during the late 1590s, this book argues that the new forms which emerged during this period were intimately linked, arising out of a particular set of geographic, intellectual, and social circumstances that existed in these urban environs. In providing a cohesive view of these disparate generic interventions, Christopher D'Addario breaks new ground in significant ways. By paying attention to the relationship between environment and individual imagination, he provides a fresh and detailed sense of the spaces and social worlds in which the writings of prominent authors, including Thomas Nashe and John Donne, were produced and experienced. In arguing that the rise of the metaphysical aesthetic occurred across a number of urban genres throughout the 1590s, not just in lyric, but also earlier in Nashe's prose, as well as in the verse satire, he rewrites English Renaissance literary history itself.

‘Urban Aesthetics in Early Modern London makes an important contribution to scholarship-in two principal ways. First, in the argument itself, which locates the renowned ‘Metaphysical' style of authorship not where we are used to finding it, in the seventeenth century, in John Donne and his school, but initially in the late sixteenth century, as inaugurated by Thomas Nashe. Second, the other authors whom D'Addario features are unique as a set: in addition to Donne, they include John Marston, John Manningham, Edward Guilpin, and Samuel Rowlands. D'Addario is an eloquent prose stylist, and a learned scholar. He writes with verve, and care.'

Patrick Cheney - Penn State University