ABSTRACT
This is the first book-length history of the range of seventeenth-century English prose writing. Roger Pooley's study begins with narrative, ranging from the fiction of Bunyan and Aphra Behn to the biographical and autobiographical work of Aubrey and Pepys. Further sections consider religious prose from the hugely influential Authorised Version to Donne's sermons, the political writing of figures as diverse as Milton, Hobbes, Locke and Marvell, cornucopian texts and the writings of the new scientists from Bacon to Newton. At a time when the boundaries of the `canon' are being increasingly revised, this is not only a major survey of a series of great works of literature, but also a fascinating social history and a guide to understanding the literature of the period as a whole.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
chapter |13 pages
Introduction: Reading Seventeenth-Century Prose
part |76 pages
Narrative
chapter |19 pages
Elizabethan Fiction
chapter |15 pages
Restoration Fiction
chapter |12 pages
History
chapter |11 pages
Biography
chapter |17 pages
Autobiography
part |80 pages
Religious Prose
chapter |10 pages
The English Bible
chapter |20 pages
The Sermon
chapter |9 pages
Devotions and Meditations
chapter |39 pages
Politicised Religion
part |44 pages
Essays and Cornucopian Texts
chapter |18 pages
The Essay
chapter |24 pages
The Cornucopian Text
part |68 pages
The Discourse of Modernity: New Idioms in Science and Politics