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book: The English Baroque in Early Modern Literature
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The English Baroque in Early Modern Literature

Language: English
Published/Copyright: 2025

About this book

The first large-scale study of English baroque literature

  • Clarifies the concept of the baroque for students and scholars across disciplines
  • Resituates early modern English literature within a transnational and multilingual network of baroque authors and artists
  • Reshapes the canon of early modern English literature in terms of the baroque
While the baroque remains a foundational concept for other European literary and aesthetic traditions, scholars have largely elided the word from British literary history. Instead of baroque, most critics prefer to use terms like metaphysical, Stuart and Laudian – words that emphasise England’s primacy rather than its connections with the world. In response to these Anglocentric approaches, The English Baroque in Early Modern Literature demonstrates how the baroque can deepen our understanding of the multilingual, cross-confessional and interdisciplinary features of early modern English literature. It connects the works of Margaret Cavendish, John Donne, John Milton and William Shakespeare, among other English authors, to the style of excess that spread across Europe and the colonial world during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In doing so, Robert Hudson Vincent offers a compelling new vision of the baroque as an aesthetic logic for thinking about and living with excess in the early modern world.

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    Frontmatter

    i
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    Contents

    v
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    Figures

    vi
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    Acknowledgements

    viii
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    Series Editors’ Preface

    x
    Lorna Hutson, Katherine Ibbett, Joe Moshenska and Kathryn Murphy
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    Introduction: The Baroque in English

    1
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    Chapter 1 Logic: The Concept of the Baroque

    10
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    Chapter 2 Nature: The Baroque Image of the World

    45
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    Chapter 3 Translation: Baroque Style and the Limits of Imitation

    79
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    Chapter 4 Passion: Baroque Devotion and the Poetics of Ecstasy

    118
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    Chapter 5 Sublime: The Baroque Masque and the Politics of Seduction

    152
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    Coda: Excess

    195
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    Bibliography

    199
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    Index

    218
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Publishing information
Pages and Images/Illustrations in book
eBook published on:
February 18, 2025
eBook ISBN:
9781399534468
Pages and Images/Illustrations in book
Main content:
240
View content
https://doi.org/10.1515/9781399534468
eBook ISBN: 9781399534468
Keywords for this book
Literary Studies
Audience(s) for this book
For universities and colleges of further and higher education
Downloaded on 22.4.2026 from https://www.degruyterbrill.com/document/doi/10.1515/9781399534468/html
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