Urban Aesthetics in Early Modern London: The Invention of the Metaphysical

By: Christopher D'Addario

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Synopsis: Tracing the demonstrative aesthetic shift in literary writings of fashionable London during the late 1590s, this book argues that the new forms which emerged during this period were intimately linked, arising out of a particular set of geographic, intellectual, and social circumstances that existed in these urban environs. In providing a cohesive view of these disparate generic interventions, Christopher D'Addario breaks new ground in significant ways. By paying attention to the relationship between environment and individual imagination, he provides a fresh and detailed sense of the spaces and social worlds in which the writings of prominent authors, including Thomas Nashe and John Donne, were produced and experienced. In arguing that the rise of the metaphysical aesthetic occurred across a number of urban genres throughout the 1590s, not just in lyric, but also earlier in Nashe's prose, as well as in the verse satire, he rewrites English Renaissance literary history itself.