The Oxford Handbook of Andrew Marvell: (Oxford Handbooks)

The Oxford Handbook of Andrew Marvell is the most comprehensive and informative collection of essays ever assembled dealing with the life and writings of the poet and politician Andrew Marvell (1621-78). Like his friend and colleague John Milton, Marvell is now seen as a dominant figure in the literary landscape of the mid-seventeenth century, producing a stunning oeuvre of poetry and prose either side of the Restoration. In the 1640s and 1650s he was the author of hypercanonical lyrics like 'To His Coy Mistress' and 'The Garden' as well as three epoch-defining poems about Oliver Cromwell. After 1660 he virtually invented the verse genre of state satire as well as becoming the most influential prose satirist of the dayDLin the process forging a long-lived reputation as an incorruptible patriot. Although Marvell himself was an intensely private and self-contained character, whose literary, religious, and political commitments are notoriously difficult to discern, the interdisciplinary contributions by an array of experts in the fields of seventeenth-century literature, history, and politics gathered together in the Handbook constitute a decisive step forward in our understanding of him. They offer a fully-rounded account of his life and writings, individual readings of his key works, considerations of his relations with his major contemporaries, and surveys of his rich and varied afterlives. Informed by the wealth of editorial and biographical work on Marvell that has been produced in the last twenty years, the volume is both a conspectus of the state of the art in Marvell studies and the springboard for future research.

Table of Contents:
Preface PART 1: MARVELL AND HIS TIMES 1: Nicholas von Maltzahn: Marvell, Writer and Politician, 1621-1678 2: Emma Wilson: Andrew Marvell and Education 3: Nicholas von Maltzahn: Marvell and Patronage 4: Ann Hughes: Marvell and the Interregnum 5: Paul Seaward: Marvell and Parliament 6: Edward Holberton: Marvell and Diplomacy 7: Charles Édouard Levillain: England's 'natural Frontier': Andrew Marvell and the Low Countries 8: Philip Connell: Marvell and the Church 9: Johanna Harris and N. H. Keeble: Marvell and Nonconformity 10: Lynn Enterline: Marvell's Unfortunate Lovers 11: Martin Dzelzainis: Marvell and Science 12: Paul Davis: Marvell and Manuscript Culture 13: Matthew Augustine: Marvell and Print Culture 14: Katherine Acheson: Visualizing Marvell 15: Helen Wilcox: Marvell and Music 16: Sean McDowell: Urban Marvell 17: Edward Paleit: Marvell's Classical Similitudes 18: Martin Dzelzainis: 'a greater errour in Chronology': Issues of Dating in Marvell PART 2: READINGS 19: Nigel Smith: 'To his Coy Mistress', The Greek Anthology and the History of Poetry 20: Gordon Teskey: Greenland: Marvell's 'The Garden' 21: Leah S. Marcus: Marvell's 'Nymph Complaining' and the Erotics of Vitalism 22: Steven Zwicker and Derek Hirst: Marvell and Lyrics of Undifference 23: Greg Chaplin: Marvell and Elegy 24: Annabel Brett: The Post-Machiavellian Poetry of 'An Horatian Ode upon Cromwell's Return from Ireland 25: Warren Chernaik: Harsh Remedies: Satire and Politics in Last Instructions to a Painter 26: Estelle Haan: Marvell's Latin Poetry and the Art of Punning 27: Julianne Werlin: 'Upon Appleton House' 28: Johanna Harris: Andrew Marvell's Letters 29: Alex Garganigo: The Rehearsal Transpros'd and The Rehearsal Transpros'd: The Second Part 30: Martin Dzelzainis and Steph Coster: The Commissioning, Writing, and Printing of Mr. Smirke: A New Account Kendra Packham: 26. Marvell, Political Print, and Picturing the Catholic: An Account of the Growth of Popery and Arbitrary Government PART 3: MARVELL AND HIS CONTEMPORARIES 32: Tom Lockwood: Marvell and Jonson 33: James Loxley: Andrew Marvell and Cavalier Poetics 34: Nicholas McDowell: Marvell's French Spirit 35: Tim Raylor: Marvell and Waller 36: Victoria Silver: 'Mr. Bayes in Mr. Bayes': The Art of Personation in Hobbes, Parker, and Marvell 37: John Rogers: Ruin the Sacred Truths: Prophecy, Form, and Nonconformity in Marvell and Milton 38: Ashley Marshall and Robert D. Hume: Marvell and the Restoration Wits 39: Mark Goldie: Marvell and his Adversaries, 1672-78 PART 4: MARVELL'S AFTERLIFE 40: Diane Purkiss: Bodleian Library MS Eng. Poet. d. 49 41: Annabel Patterson: Marvell the Patriot 42: Michael O'Neill: Marvell and Nineteenth-Century Poetry: Wordsworth to Tennyson 43: Steven Matthews: Marvell in the Twentieth- and Twenty-First Centuries

About the Author :
Martin Dzelzainis is Professor of Literature and Thought at the University of Leicester. Educated in Coventry and at both Cambridges, he taught at Royal Holloway, University of London for many years before moving to Leicester in 2010. He has held fellowships from Marsh's Library, the Huntington, and the Leverhulme Trust. Edward Holberton is a lecturer in the Department of English at the University of Bristol. He is the author of Poetry and the Cromwellian Protectorate: Culture, Politics and Institutions (Oxford University Press, 2009), and several journal articles on Marvell. His research interests include ongoing work on Marvell's relationships with the diplomatic sphere, and a monograph project on literature, empire, and the Atlantic world during the period 1650-1750.

Review :
There is a unity of purpose, focus, and sometimes even methodology to this volume that one does not often find in a handbook. That unity allows the volume to stage important higher-order debates within Marvell studies, as well as suggest promising avenues for future research. For advanced students and for academics looking efficiently to get abreast of Marvell studies the The Oxford Handbook of Andrew Marvell should be invaluable. These are essays of excellent quality, written by an impressive array of senior literary scholars and newer researchers, ably supported by leading historians of the mid-century and Restoration crises. Highly recommended. Ambitious upper-division undergraduates through faculty. Non-specialists will find the Handbook intelligent and various; specialists will appreciate its scan of all that Marvell has to offer. The Handbook will be anarbiter in seminars and a fixture in Marvell citation. It gives hefty help to every Marvell reader, enthralled or aspiring. As we mark the four-hundredth birthday of our author on March 31, 2021, The Oxford Handbook of Andrew Marvell comes at a perfect time to celebrate the authors and networks who have in recent decades brought Marvell to the forefront of early modern studies.