Back Cover
Longman Critical Readers
General Editor: Stan Smith
Professor of English, University of Dundee
This important series takes full account of contemporary literary theory, providing collections of key modern readings of major authors, genres and critical approaches. Prefaced by a wide-ranging editorial introduction setting the readings in context and exploring the issues they raise, individual volumes in the series offer the student authoritative and stimulating guides to the best theoretically-informed critical work on subjects from Chaucer to the present.
Andrew Marvell brings together ten recent and critically informed essays by leading scholars on one of the most challenging and important seventeenth-century poets. The essays examine Marvell s poems, from lyrics, such as 'To His Coy Mistress' and 'The Nymph Complaining for the Death of her Fawn', to celebrations of Cromwell and Republican Civil War culture and his biting Restoration satires. Representing the most significant critical trends in Marvell criticism over the last twenty years, the essays and the authoritative editorial work provide an excellent introduction to Marvell's work.
Students of Renaissance and seventeenth-century literature, English Civil War writing, and seventeenth-century social and cultural history will find this collection a useful guide to helping them appreciate and understand Marvell's poetry.
Thomas Healy is Reader in Renaissance Studies at Birkbeck College, University of London.