This chapter moves the discussion away from allegory into new generic terrain and attends to the spatial paradoxes and utopian drives of romance, paying particular attention to the relationship between the natural environment and the landscape of chivalry. Romance is traditionally associated with marvellous settings and the traversal of impossible distance; yet, in the late sixteenth century, the mode was also associated with inertia, passivity, and the petrifaction of knowledge. It is famed for its dilatory qualities and its tendency to postpone endings for the delight and entertainment of an audience; however, as critics such as Andrew King have observed, Spenser’s Faerie Queene offers a radical reassessment of the mode. In Spenser’s hands, the epistemological strategies of romance allow for both deliberate plotting and regressive drift, and the chapter places particular emphasis on the capacity of imaginative literature to confront conditions of uncertainty and ignorance.

I saw him dead' is probably the best-known line in Andrew Marvell's Poem upon the Death of His Late Highness the Lord Protector. Recognising the intertextuality and the irony of 'I saw him dead' can help to re-evaluate Marvell's relationship to Oliver Cromwell, which involved more hostility and resentment. Mirrors are obviously an important motif in Shakespeare's history plays but the Cromwell elegy's allusions to the Henriad suggest that Marvell is doing something different. Marvell has frequent recourse to Falstaff and Prince Hal in his later satire on religious bigotry, The Rehearsal Transpros'd, which invokes Shakespeare repeatedly, and 1 Henry IV more than any other play. In The Rehearsal's four allusions to 1 Henry IV and single allusion to Merry Wives Marvell consistently assumes the position of Hal in relation to both Falstaff and Henry IV, whom he associates with Parker.

In the winter of 1673-1674, the Stuart poet laureate and historiographer royal, John Dryden, famously undertook to recast John Milton's blank-verse epic as a rhymed semi-opera. The most immediate context for Dryden's 'tagging' of Milton's verses is the controversy over rhyme which had arisen with the new heroic drama. There is precious little extant commentary on Paradise Lost dating to the reigns of Charles and James; indeed, the earliest entries for the poem's critical reception in most sourcebooks are Andrew Marvell's commendatory poem and Dryden's praise in The State of Innocence. Marvell's humiliating image of Dryden drudging like a 'pack-horse' to tag Milton's points is thus not only interested but premature, for it is in The State of Innocence that Dryden plots the complex effects of some of his greatest Augustan poetry.

This chapter explores the growing challenges to and revisions of prevailing historicisms in the criticism of early modern literature. It explains how Thomas Browne and W. G. Sebald's sense of the powerful yet surprisingly discontinuous ways in which the past acts upon the people might inflect the challenges as well as the work as literary historians generally. Much of Browne's most luminous thinking on the reiies and losses associated with the passage of time in Hydriotaphia, Urn-Burial ruminates on the incessant and inevitable fading of knowledge from the historical register. A historicism rooted in an awareness of the affective and the material can also help to re-imagine the individual's particular encounters with early modern literature. The stimulating new approaches to early modern writing pose some methodological challenges in their attempts to access past affects or precise aesthetic experiences.

For many years now, historians have engaged in fierce debates over the extent and efficacy of censorship during the 1640s. Such debates have a distinguished history, as scholars over the last century have taken up various, sometimes widely divergent positions on the topic of censorship in Civil-War England. This chapter focuses on the impact of press controls during the Civil Wars, and analyzes the ways in which the twin issues of censorship and press freedom imbued the discourse of the 1640s. Prynne was scarcely alone in bringing instances of censorship to the public eye. Edward Terry's remarks indicate once again the public perception of the Levellers as an existential threat even as they demonstrate the scope of the Levellers' cultural influence. It is significant that Terry's sermon was printed with the title Lawless Liberty.

Chapter 1 conducts an in-depth discussion of the ways in which Islamic State (IS) murder propaganda was produced and distributed in the UK, in the years 2014–2015. By focussing on the careful construction of personas by both Islamic State and the UK government, my aim is to demonstrate the ways in which emergencies may be packaged and deployed in order to inspire specific responses in targeted audiences. On the one hand, IS used their technological fluency to ventriloquise their victims in order to demonstrate absolute mastery and justification for their military incursions, inspiring potential converts around the world. On the other, the British press carefully packaged ‘Jihadi John’ as a monster, in order to stoke public anxiety about IS and draw support for military reprisals. In this chapter I begin a discussion of the image, and the ways in which the disconnect between the image and its subject may be exploited in order to produce affective responses within the spectator.

In analysing ‘Sanies I’ and ‘Serena II’ meticulously, with special attention to the animal imagery, Conor Carville in this chapter links Otto Rank’s theory of the trauma of birth with Eric Santner’s recent idea of ‘creaturely life’ – the life that is exposed to biopolitical power at moments of trauma. Trauma is here considered as constitutive of the subject, not an exceptional phenomenon, and also as providing the raw material for biopolitical power. In the process of Carville’s analyses emerge hitherto uncharted networks concerning Beckett’s fixation on the trauma of birth and the contemporary biopolitical concerns with birth, reproduction and population in Ireland and Britain. Carville’s article not only provides original close readings of those difficult poems in the light of Rank but also illustrates how a highly personal unease about sexual identity caused by birth trauma can be connected to the biopolitical discourses by the use of Santner’s idea of ‘creaturely life’ that itself draws on the ideas of Benjamin, Foucault, Lacan, Agamben and other theorists.