The English Baroque in Early Modern Literature

The first large-scale study of English baroque literature

• Clarifies the concept of the baroque for students and scholars across disciplines
• Resituates early modern English literature within a transnational and multilingual network of baroque authors and artists
• Reshapes the canon of early modern English literature in terms of the baroque

While the baroque remains a foundational concept for other European literary and aesthetic traditions, scholars have largely elided the word from British literary history. Instead of baroque, most critics prefer to use terms like metaphysical, Stuart and Laudian – words that emphasise England’s primacy rather than its connections with the world. In response to these Anglocentric approaches, The English Baroque in Early Modern Literature demonstrates how the baroque can deepen our understanding of the multilingual, cross-confessional and interdisciplinary features of early modern English literature. It connects the works of Margaret Cavendish, John Donne, John Milton and William Shakespeare, among other English authors, to the style of excess that spread across Europe and the colonial world during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In doing so, Robert Hudson Vincent offers a compelling new vision of the baroque as an aesthetic logic for thinking about and living with excess in the early modern world.