Digressive Voices in Early Modern English Literature

Abstract

This book begins and ends with the intellectual and imaginative pleasures of narrative wandering. ‘To digress’ in early modern England carried a range of associations with authority and gender, from amplitude and escape to deviance and transgression. The book argues that writers classically trained in verbal contest used the liberty of digression to create a complex form of underground writing and self-definition in some of the richest non-dramatic texts of 17th-century England; such a pointed use of digressiveness in the period has not been recognized. Within these textual mazes writers captured the ambiguities of political occasion and patronage, while they anatomized enemies and mourned personal loss. The narrator of each text addresses a specter of speechlessness as well as loss of self through a figurative descent to an unstable underworld associated with a female or effeminate weakness. In fresh readings of Donne's Anniversaries, Marvell's Upon Appleton House, Sir Thomas Browne's The Garden of Cyrus, Milton's Paradise Lost, Dryden's The Hind and the Panther and A Discourse of Satire, and Swift's A Tale of a Tub, the book draws attention to the expansiveness of many of the period's literary forms, such as country-house poem, literary anatomy, dedicatory epistle, beast fable, and epic. Turning current sensitivity toward the silenced voice in a new direction, the book argues that rhetorical amplitude might suggest anxieties about speech and silence for early modern men forced to be competitive yet circumspect to make their voices heard.

The River Wharfe and Verbeia, Celtic Goddess

“…In other languages the same roots produced German Beil 'axe' and Greek phítros 'tree-trunk; block, log' (which are all cut by axes). 6 More important here are Celtic forms. Sir Ifor Williams drew attention to Welsh erfid 'blow, stroke, thrust', also 'ebb; breakers; stream'.…”

“…John Morris-Jones, A Welsh Grammar(Oxford, 1913), 128-9, 267-8. 5 W. J. Watson, The History of the Celtic Place-Names of Scotland (Edinburgh, 1926), 425 6. Alexander Brückner, Slownik etymologiczny jezyka polskiego (Kraków, 1927), 25 7.…”

‘Devolving through the Maze of Eloquence’: James Thomson's The Seasons and the Eighteenth‐Century Verse Labyrinth

“…Anne Cotterill, in her study of early modern digression, has established the currency of the Ovidean maze-river in English literature of the period. 70 Notwithstanding increasing suspicion of Ovid in the eighteenth century, meandering and labyrinthine rivers continued to appear in a wide range of British works during the decades preceding Thomson's poem, from the verses in Tonson's Poetical Miscellanies of 1709 and the passages in Blackmore discussed above to Aaron Hill's play on 'Maeander' and 'maze' in the preface to his own Creation. 71 Furthermore, a new translation of the Maeander passage, by Samuel Croxall, had appeared in 1717 as part of Tonson's prestigious and lavishly produced volume of episodes from Metamorphoses: In the preface Samuel Garth singles out the original of this passage for its 'ill-judged Superfluity' 73 and advises that it be cropped by the translator, but Croxall's version retains Ovid's effects of self-division, repetition and doubling, features it shares with many of The Seasons' maze passages, especially those concerning rivers.…”