The Chameleon or the Sponge?: Marvell, Milton, and the Politics of Literary History
Andrew Marvell’s critical stock has never been higher. Long admired for a handful of widely anthologized lyrics, more recent interest in his prose writings has revealed Marvell to be among the most penetrating observers of the debates over liberty and toleration that convulsed the seventeenth century. As a result of this attention Marvell himself has become—along with his friend John Milton—closely identified with the founding of modern liberalism. My concern in this essay however is to interrogate the ways in which Marvell’s politics have been read under the shadow of Milton; and indeed I discover a “Miltonizing” hermeneutic in common between the High-Church controversialists who repudiated Marvell’s tolerationist pamphlet The Rehearsal Transpros’d (1672) and modern historians and critics who have sought to write Marvell into the history of English liberty. Without seeking to nullify Marvell’s significant contribution to that history, I argue here that the lyric poet of “inconclusiveness” is more continuous with the Restoration politician than we have thought; and moreover that by taking Marvell’s politics on his own terms we stand to gain valuable perspective on the unstable divisions and contingencies of seventeenth-century political experience.
“A Mastery in Fooling”: Marvell, the Mock-Book, and the Surprising Life of “Mr. Bayes”
Since the publication of Marvell’s prose works a decade ago, our understanding of Marvell’s place within Restoration debates over political theology has been richly extended and deepened. This article focuses new attention on the literary significance of Marvell’s controversial prose for the early eighteenth century. Students of Swift have long known that Swift turned to Marvell’s satire The Rehearsal Transpros’d as a model for A Tale of a Tub. In this essay I suggest a much wider debt to Marvell among eighteenth-century satirists than has so far been acknowledged. Not only did Marvell’s character “Mr. Bayes” provide a template for images of the mad, Modern author in the works of Scriblerian “wits” and Grub Street “dunces,” but also, Marvell’s fooling with the nature of the book, I argue, hints at a vital link with the materialist poetics of The Dunciad. This essay thus discovers some novel points of contact between the murky world of Restoration controversy and the “golden age of satire” in England.
The role of prolactin in andrology: what is new?
Prolactin (PRL) has been long deemed as a hormone involved only in female reproduction. However, PRL is a surprising hormone and, since its identification in the 1970s, its attributed functions have greatly increased. However, its specific role in male health is still widely unknown. Recently, low PRL has been associated with reduced ejaculate and seminal vesicle volume in infertile subjects. In addition, in men consulting for sexual dysfunction, hypoprolactinemia has been associated with erectile dysfunction and premature ejaculation, findings further confirmed in the general European population and infertile men. Several metabolic derangements, recapitulating metabolic syndrome, have also been associated with low PRL both in men with sexual dysfunction and from the general European population. In men with sexual dysfunction, followed-up for more than 4 years, low PRL was identified as an independent predictor of the incidence of major adverse cardiovascular events. Finally, an association with anxiety or depressive symptoms has been found in men with sexual dysfunction and from the general European population. While a direct role for impaired PRL function in the pathogenesis of these reproductive, sexual, metabolic and psychological disorders is conceivable, the possibility that low PRL is a mirror of an increased dopaminergic or a decreased serotonergic tone cannot be ruled-out. Hyperactivity of the dopaminergic system can explain only a few of the aforementioned findings, whereas a hypo-serotonergic tone fits well with the clinical features associated with low PRL, and there is significant evidence supporting the hypothesis that PRL could be a mirror of serotonin in the brain.