William Empson's work had a profound impact on the critical movement known as 'New Criticism', whose major exponents viewed poems as elaborate structures of complex meanings to which the critic would devote rigorous attention. New Criticism thrived in the twentieth century, because it mapped well into the classroom of a growing academic discipline, whereby a teacher could convey to spellbound students the mysteries revealed by the craft of close reading. Practical Criticism exhibits all the virtues and liabilities that imbued this critical practice. Stephen Greenblatt emphasised that New Historicism should exhibit a greater methodological self-awareness than either the older historicism or New Criticism. Drawing largely from anthropologists such as Clifford Geertz, Greenblatt urged interpretations that were fully conscious of their own cultural contingencies. Theory and feminist criticism certainly helped shake up the boundaries between literature and culture.

This chapter explores the so-called ‘refugee crisis’ of 2015 and beyond, in a discussion of the relationship between the spectator and the ‘other’. Drawing on two theatrical case studies – Vanishing Point’s (2016) The Destroyed Room and Zinnie Harris’ (2015) How to Hold Your Breath, I suggest ways in which live performance can respond to the erasure of humanity that is often practised upon the refugee in the circulation of images. One chief strategy is through storytelling, an art-form that relies upon personal interaction and privileges experience over information. This chapter also applies Bernard Stiegler’s theory of ‘spiritual misery’ to performance analysis, and concludes with a discussion of the dangers of building a visual economy on the destruction of the face of the other.

Historians of gender and sexuality are finding in court records a trickle of cases of sexual assault on prepubescent girls in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. More interesting still, at least in a Marvellian perspective, is the possibility of detecting self-awareness, subjectivity, and thus even of measuring some meanings of cross-generational erotic attachment in the England of Andrew Marvell. As Marvell knew well, there were many sites and modes of erotic expression and attachment, and thus perhaps of sexualised abuse if not necessarily of sex abuse. One such site, renowned for its conjuncture of fierce power and no less fierce idealisation, was surely the schoolroom. For a brief moment in the later seventeenth century there were thus some who were willing to take seriously the abuse sustained by the child.

This chapter draws on Epic Romance, an important and wide-ranging study in which Colin Burrow argues for reading epic and romance not as distinct genres but as antagonistic impulses at work within a single tradition. Andrew Marvell's attack argues for a debilitating interdependence between the predominantly romance mode of Wallerian panegyric and the failures of English maritime power and court ideology. In treating Archibald Douglas's death, Marvell reaches back beyond Edmund Waller and Torquato Tasso and attempts to purge even from the ultimate Virgilian source of the topos the romance passions of love and pity. Waller invariably allows amorous motive to trump national obligation and imperial ambition, romance to triumph over epic. It is the political manifestation of this triumph, as the abandonment of civic duty in the face of unregulated sexual desire, that Marvell's Last Instructions diagnoses in its treatment of the Stuart court.

This chapter argues that to take the full measure of this extraordinarily ordinary Englishman, it is needed to take fuller account of Nehemiah Wallington as a non-elite reader and writer. For a closer study of Wallington's working methods and organizational strategies for his writing, an evidentiary mix of the surviving writing books and Wallington's reports of the entire corpus in one of his later books are used. Wallington's observations on his devotional life do not appear to be part of a continuum of writing, one orientated to a more polished, final product. Some of Wallington's contemporary note-takers pasted passages from printed materials into their notebooks. From the beginning and throughout, Wallington's goal was to write and keep writing until the lessons of faith were fully inscribed in his heart. It is suspected that Wallington understood fairly early on that his writing was forging pathways into memory exercises.

The introduction contextualises the book through analysis of political rhetoric which is designed to produce a sense of emergency. Building on recent theories from geography, I offer a definition of ‘emergency’ as the projection of a future crisis which demands compliance to a defined set of common practices (protocol). I define my key terms ‘theatre’, ‘spectator’ and ‘image’, and undertake a brief case study into the ways in which theatre might push beyond the ‘representable’ – which is how, I argue, emergencies are produced and maintained at the level of the image.

The association of wicked magic and cold in Osmond's masque was understandable to an early modern audience familiar with the traditional Christian alignment of cold and the far north with Satan, of severe weather with witchery and the demonic. Beyond the early modern period, King Arthur has been enjoyed for Henry Purcell's music but little understood. John Dryden's King Arthur is locked in a war with pagan Saxon Oswald, King of Kent, who aspires to enlarge Saxon power in England and win for himself Arthur's beloved Emmeline, heiress of Cornwall. Turning cold as a physical response to evil is the moral touchstone Dryden evokes connecting winter cold, William III's wars, and England's fallen world, a lost spring. The masque brilliantly crystallises the moral and political implications of the violence of northern cold for England, which is fondly imagined as a temperate garden enjoying spring's melting, fertile warmth.

Critics have searched literary texts for associations, trace echoes and appropriations from print culture. So common is this in Andrew Marvell studies that it has led to a call for improved stress-testing; though it is clear that his poetry does have patterns of echoing that are distinct from others. Marvell's An Horatian Ode upon Cromwell's Return from Ireland is a lesson in the potency of the interplay between interpenetration and separation. Focusing on a short and celebrated passage from the Horatian Ode, this chapter examines some matter of Marvell's engagement with the world of pamphlets and journalism, some textual echoes that show the poet, in Charlie Williams's phrase. The litmus test for Marvell's personal political allegiances during the 1650s, and the preferred case study for his aesthetics of ambivalence, has long been the Horatian Ode.

This chapter begins with a discussion of tragedy, in particular the figure of the ‘scapegoat’ who must be sacrificed in order for the polis to reproduce itself. In the early twenty-first century, I argue that this figure has been replaced with images, and that the world they bring in to being is one of things, rather than subjects. The extremities of this process lead spectators to make images out of themselves which, I argue, is suicidal. I develop this argument through analysis of the rhetoric of Donald Trump, and examples taken from events between 2016 and 2018 where images of suicide have been circulated on the Internet. Drawing the conversation back into tragedy I conclude with an examination of Alice Birch’s (2017) play Anatomy of a Suicide, which I argue recasts the tragic hero in the light of a society that has become suicidal.