Book dossier

Digressive voices in early modern English literature

by Anne Cotterill

"To digress in seventeenth-century England carried a range of meaning associated with deviation or departure. Anne Cotterill looks afresh at major nondramatic texts by Donne, Marvell, Browne, Milton, and Dryden, whose digressive speakers are haunted by personal and public uncertainty. She demonstrates that early modern writers trained in verbal contest developed richly labyrinthine voices that captured the ambiguities of political occasion and aristocratic patronage, while anatomizing enemies and mourning personal loss. Turning current sensitivity toward the silenced voice a new direction, Cotterill argues that rhetorical amplitude might suggest anxieties about speech and attack for men forced to be competitive yet circumspect as they made their voices heard."--Jacket.