Andrew Marvell

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-xvi

   PDF

2. Introduction: A Literary Life?

   • Matthew C. Augustine

   Pages 1-7

3. Andreae Filius: East Riding, Yorkshire, 1621–1633

   • Matthew C. Augustine

   Pages 9-27

4. In loco parentis: Cambridge, 1633–1641

   • Matthew C. Augustine

   Pages 29-50

5. ‘Our wits have drawn th’infection of our times’: London and the Continent, 1641–1650

   • Matthew C. Augustine

   Pages 51-89

6. ‘Some great prelate of the grove’: London and Nun Appleton, Yorkshire, 1650–1652

   • Matthew C. Augustine

   Pages 91-130

7. ‘With my most humble service’: England and the Continent, 1652–1659

   • Matthew C. Augustine

   Pages 131-160

8. ‘His anger reached that rage which passed his art’: England, the Netherlands, and the Baltic, 1659–1667

   • Matthew C. Augustine

   Pages 161-186

9. ‘The interest and happiness of the king and kingdom’: London, 1667–1678

   • Matthew C. Augustine

   Pages 187-227

10. Correction to: Andrew Marvell: A Literary Life

    • Matthew C. Augustine

    Pages C1-C1

11. Back Matter

    Pages 229-234

    PDF

This book provides an accessible account of the poet and politician Andrew Marvell’s life (1621-1678) and of the great events which found reflection in his work and in which he and his writings eventually played a part. At the same time, considerable space is afforded to reflecting deeply on the modes and meanings of Marvell’s art, redressing the balance of recent biography and criticism which has tended to dwell on the public and political aspects of this literary life at the expense of lyric invention and lyric possibility. Moving beyond the familiar terms of imitation and influence, the book aims at reconstructing an embodied history of reading and writing, acts undertaken within a series of complex physical and social environments, from the Hull Charterhouse to the coffee houses and print shops of Restoration London. Care has been taken to cover the whole of Marvell’s career, in verse and prose, even as the book places the lyric achievement at the centre of its vision.

 

• Poetry
• English Civil War
• Lyric
• Donne
• Milton
• Marvell

'Matthew C. Augustine has managed to achieve, if not the impossible, then something vanishingly rare in the genre of literary biography. In tracing the frequently intricate links between Marvell’s writings and their contexts, he engages (and often challenges) readers familiar with the terrain while providing enough guidance to newcomers to make them feel welcome. Most valuable are the analyses of poems that have received less critical attention than the acknowledged masterpieces, but which are deeply suggestive about the life and character of the man who produced them.'

– Joanna Picciotto, Associate Professor, University of California, Berkeley, USA, author of Labors of Innocence in Early Modern England (2010).

• School of English, University of St Andrews, St Andrews, UK

  Matthew C. Augustine

Matthew C. Augustine is Senior Lecturer in the School of English at the University of St Andrews, UK. A past president of the Andrew Marvell Society, he is the author of Aesthetics of Contingency: Writing, Politics, and Culture in England, 1639-89 (2018), and principal convener of the British Academy Conference ‘Reimagining Andrew Marvell: The Poet at 400’.

 

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