Aesthetics of Contingency

Matthew C. Augustine is a Lecturer in the School of English at the University of St Andrews

• Introduction: remapping early modern literature1. ‘He saw a greater Sun appear’: waiting for the apocalypse in Milton’s Poems 16452. ‘We goe to heaven against each others wills’: revising Religio Medici in the English Revolution3. ‘But Iconoclastes drawn in little’: making and unmaking a Whig Marvell4. ‘It had an odde promiscuous tone’: Lord Rochester and Restoration modernity5. ‘Transprosing and Transversing’: religion, revolution, and the end of history in Dryden’s late works6. CodaIndex

'For a work concerned to muddy critical waters, Aesthetics of Contingency is admirably clear, and its arguments broadly convincing.'Taylor & Francis Online'Aesthetics of Contingency is admirably clear, and its arguments broadly convincing. Augustine’s study is a salutary reminder of something too often overlooked: that poets and writers did not usually consider themselves ambassadors for the ideals of whatever literary period posterity has since consigned them to – and that the contingencies of history always blind writers in any given moment to the outcomes of a future that seems to us so self-evident.' The Seventeenth Century