Description
Book SynopsisHow can one experience the apocalypse in the present? Lyric Apocalypse argues that John Milton’s and Andrew Marvell’s lyrics depict revelation as an immediately perceptible event. In so doing, their lyrics explore the nature of events, the modern question of what it means for something to happen in the present.
Trade Review"Lyric Apocalypse is a fine piece of work: timely, original, and persuasive-a powerful combination of theoretical argument with illuminating close reading. Netzely's sensitivity to verbal and syntactical alternatives is remarkable." -- -Judith H. Anderson Indiana University "This book explores both poets' views of apocalyptic change in the present." -The Chronicle of Higher Education "Netzley offers a theoretically sophisticated contemplation of the relationship between lyric and history. As he shows, lyric's concern with the momentary and evental holds the potential to disrupt historical narrativization, which in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries is also the potential to query the Providential and the prophetic. This book ought to be read by scholars of Milton and Marvell, and will be appreciated well beyond early modern studies for an approach to lyric poetry informed by the work of Agamben, Adorno, and Deleuze and Guattari." -- -Feisal Mohamed author of Milton and the Post-Secular Present
Table of ContentsAcknowledgments Introduction. Lyric Apocalypses, Transformative Time, and the Possibility of Endings 1. Apocalyptic Means: Allegiance, Force, and Events in Marvell's Cromwell Trilogy and Royalist Elegies 2. Hope in the Present: Paratactic Apocalypses and Contemplative Events in Milton's Sonnets 3. What Happens in Lycidas Apocalypse, Possibility, and Events in Milton's Pastoral Elegy 4. How Poems End: Apocalypse, Symbol, and the Event of Ending in "Upon Appleton House" Conclusion. Revelation: Learning Freedom and the End of Crisis Notes Bibliography Index
