Description
Author of plays, love-lyrics, essays and, among other works, The Civil War, the Davideis and the Pindarique Odes, Abraham Cowley made a deep impression on seventeenth-century letters, attested by his extravagant funeral and his burial next to Chaucer and Spenser in Westminster Abbey. Ejected from Cambridge for his politics, he found refuge in royalist Oxford before seeing long service as secretary to Queen Henrietta Maria, and as a Crown agent, on the continent. In the mid-1650s he returned to England, was imprisoned and made an accommodation with the Cromwellian regime. This volume of essays provides the modern critical attention Cowley’s life and writings merit.
Table of Contents
Introduction:
Philip Major
1 Abraham Cowley and Print: Paratexts and Contexts
Robert Wilcher
2 Laurels for the Conquered: Cowley, Epic, and History
Warren Chernaik
3 Generic Dialogue and the Sublime in Cowley: Epic, Didactic, Pindaric
Philip Hardie
4 Cowley’s Epic Experiments
Maggie Kilgour
5 Abraham Cowley and the English literary canon
Gail Mobley
6 Abraham Cowley’s 1656 Poems: Form and Context
Victoria Moul
7 The Fruits of Retirement: Political Engagement in the Plantarum Libri Sex
Caroline Spearing
8 Sacred and Secular in Cowley’s Essays
Philip Major
9 ‘An Old and unfashionable building’: Cowley’s dramatic writing and rewriting
Stephania Crowther
10 ‘The Pindarick Way’: Cowley’s Pindarics and the English Libretto
Isaac Harrison Louth
