John Dryden

Essays on the most important poet of the seventeenth century by ten experts on Dryden's prose, poems, and plays, including James A. Winn, Phillip Harth, and Alan Roper. Individually, these pieces help us to rethink Dryden's encounter with the full range of political and cultural issues of his age: with the intricacies of court alliance, the temptations and dangers of empire, the dynamics of patronage and literary polemic, the frustrations of loyalism, and the twilight world of Roman Catholic recusancy he entered near the close of his century. Collectively these essays also urge us to reflect on the breadth and varied circumstances of Dryden's work and thereby on the chronology and character of early modernity, a category that often elides the Restoration and obscures its art.