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.
Andrew Marvell on Renaissance Translation Practice
Abstract:Andrew Marvell's commendatory poems to Robert Witty and Milton constitute his most explicit statements regarding not only translation but also writing in general, their commonalities revealing a remarkable steadiness in poetics over a period of two decades. The ethics of translation Marvell advocates in "To His Worthy Friend Doctor Witty"—ones that are rooted in Puritan tradition and overlap with key ideas from modern-day translation theory—provide a helpful basis for considering the specific issue of handling scripture that is raised in the poem to Milton. In both works, Marvell advocates that an exact essence of meaning is to be translated from source text to target.
Beings of nature and reason: mythological masculinities in early 18th-century French art and visual culture
Statement of Originality Acknowledgments List of Illustrations Introduction 11 Chapter One Of Myth and Men 27 Chapter Two In the Likeness of Bacchus 62 Chapter Three Venus and a Satyr 97 Chapter Four Pan and Syrinx 141 Chapter Five Marsyas Flayed by the Order of Apollo 175 Conclusion 212 Catalogue of Images 227 Bibliography 300