Literary Culture in Early Modern England, 1630–1700 Angles of Contingency

This book explores literary culture in England between 1630 and 1700, focusing on connections between material, epistemic, and political conditions of literary writing and reading. In a number of case studies and close readings, it presents the seventeenth century as a period of change that saw a fundamental shift towards a new cultural configuration: neoclassicism. This shift affected a wide array of social practices and institutions, from poetry to politics and from epistemology to civility.