Digressive Voices in Early Modern English Literature [Hardcover]

Cotterill turns feminist sensitivity toward silenced voices to look afresh at major nondramatic texts by Donne, Marvell, Browne, Milton, and Dryden. Anne Cotterill examines richly digressive speakers who carve literary mazes through a dangerous world for psychological, political, and poetic survival--and attack.

Introduction
1. Breathless: Digression and Survival in1 Henry VI
2. 'Motion in Corruption': Digression and Descent in Donne'sAnniversaries
3. Marvell's Watery Maze: Digression and Discovery at Nun Appleton
4. Sounding 'Wisdom's Way': Digression and Delay inParadise Lost
5. Parenthesis at the Center: Digression and Mystery inThe Hind and the Panther
6. The Devious Progress of Satire: Digression and Vengeance in Dryden's Late Preface
7. Dislocation, Dipossession, and the Voice Come Home: An Epilogue on the 'Modern' Digression
Bibliography
Index

Cotterill has written a splendid book that reflects her engagement with the seventeenth century across the Resoration divide. Her formal sensitivity to both language and rhetoric and her deft positioning of the individual texts within the trajectory of their writers' careers make each chapter memorable. --Modern Philology

This welcome book deftly dismantles period divisions and offers a new angle on the relation between poetry, literary writing, and politics. Cotterill emphasizes the pleasures and intricacies of the literary text in her compelling readings. --Studies in English Literature 1500-1900