Emergent Nation: Early Modern British Literature in Transition, 1660–1714
Emergent Nation: Early Modern British Literature in Transition, 1660–1714
The years 1660 to 1714 represent a fraught transitional period, one caught between two now dominant periodization rubrics: early modern and the long eighteenth century. Containing narratives of disruption, restoration, and reconfiguration, Emergent Nation: Early Modern British Literature in Transition, 1660–1714 explores the conjunctions and disjunctions between historical and literary developments in this period, when the sociable, rivalrous textual world of letters registered and accelerated changes. Each of the volume's four parts highlights the relationship of various literary forms to a different kind of transformation - generic, ideological, cultural, or local. The five chapters in each section rigorously probe the conditions that affected the period's literary transformations, and interrogate the traditions that canonical and less established writers inherited, adapted, and often challenged. In making a case for an early mimetically produced English nation, this book, through its concentration on literary evidence and transitions also makes innovative contributions to an understanding of nationalism in the period.
- Highlights a different kind of literary change - generic, ideological, cultural, or local - across the Long Restoration era
- Renegotiates the divide between the early modern and eighteenth century
- Demonstrates new ways of gauging the literary forms of early nationhood
Reviews & endorsements
'… Emergent Nations proves as vibrantly heterogeneous and microcosmic as London's new parks.' Alex Garganigo, The Review of English Studies
'… [a] very welcome, very accomplished, and surely important volume.' Matthew C. Augustine, Modern Philology
'An extraordinary survey of 157 years of British literature, when all was in transition, this trilogy is a milestone publishing event. Essential reading for both historians and anyone who wants to understand the literature of today.' Cliff Cunningham, SunNewsAustin
'Each essay concludes with suggestions for further reading, and many are accompanied by clear, well reproduced black- and- white illustrations … signal achievements in current early modern scholarship.' Elizabeth Skerpan-Wheeler, Milton Quarterly
Product details
May 2025Paperback
9781108436861
0 pages
14 b/w illus.
Not yet published - available from May 2025
Table of Contents
- Introduction: national transitions, literary transitions Elizabeth Sauer
- Part I. Generic Transitions:
- 1. Pedantry and party politics: essays in the public sphere Denise Gigante
- 2. 'Familiar things … made new': epic and mock-epic verse, 1660–1714 Mark Blackwell
- 3. The satiric contract David Rosen ‎and Aaron Santesso
- 4. Tragedy, comedy, tragicomedy and the incubation of new genres:
- 1660–1714 Marcie Frank
- 5. Travel literature and the emergent nation Clement Hawes
- Part II. Ideological Transitions:
- 6. Literature, religion and party politics, 1660–1714 Melinda S. Zook
- 7. The dissidence of dissent in late seventeenth-century English literature Elizabeth Sauer
- 8. Power and profit: literature and the English commercial empire, 1651–1714 Ramesh Mallipeddi
- 9. 'Heaven's center, nature's lap': literary models of nation and empire, 1660–1714 Suvir Kaul
- 10. Brave new world: a Restoration debate Margaret Kean
- Part III. Cultural Transitions:
- 11. Female wits and the late Stuart stage Bridget Orr
- 12. Deregulating the libertine mind: wine, wit, and wanton fancy James Steintrager
- 13. After libertinism: the passions of the polite Christian hero Christopher Tilmouth
- 14. Chymistry, primary qualities, and empirical knowledge Helen Thompson
- 15. Information and irony Sean Silver
- Part IV. Local Transitions:
- 16. Nation and environment in Britain, 1660–1705 Robert Markley
- 17. Creating the territories of recreation: parks, squares, and the exotic in London's little wilderness Kevin L. Cope
- 18. Early English sinology, 1577–1688 William Poole
- 19. John Dryden and Anne Killigrew: postmortems on the Restoration Jennifer Brady
- ‎20. In defense of the short eighteenth century:
- 1714 as year zero Pat Rogers.
