The Oxford English Literary History: Volume 4. 1603-1660: Literary Cultures of the Early Seventeenth Century

The Oxford English Literary History is the new century’s definitive account of a rich and diverse literary heritage that stretches back for a millennium and more.

Each of these thirteen groundbreaking volumes offers a leading scholar’s considered assessment of the authors, works, cultural traditions, events, and ideas that shaped the literary voices of their age. The series will enlighten and inspire not only everyone studying, teaching, and researching in English Literature, but all serious readers.

This volume surveys the rich English literary tradition, 1603-1660, in the context of the eventful decades between the accession of James I and the restoration of Charles II. The first Part describes the ’social rules of writing.’ Who could become a writer in the early seventeenth century? How could a literary career be pursued? How was literary work disseminated? And how did those practices change between 1603 and 1660? The second Part discusses the period’s most innovative and important literary genres including satiric city comedy, country house poetry, chorography, masque, tragedy, tragicomedy, religious poetry, epic, the poetry of love and friendship, and a variety of prose.

Katharine Eisaman Maus, James Branch Cabell Professor of English, University of Virginia

Katharine Eisaman Maus is James Branch Cabell Professor of English at the University of Virginia, specializing in the literature of the English Renaissance. She has received fellowships from the Guggenheim, American Council of Learned Societies, National Endowment for the Humanities, and Leverhulme Foundation.