Enchanted ground : reimagining John Dryden / edited by Jayne Lewis and Maximillian E. Novak.

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

For Enchanted Ground , Jayne Lewis and Maximillian E. Novak have brought together many of the world's experts on Dryden, and their essays reflect a range of new, uniquely twenty-first-century views of him.

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CHOICE Review

First presented as lectures at UCLA's William Andrews Clark Memorial Library in 2000 in celebration of the tercentenary of Dryden's death in 1700 (not of his birth, despite the unfortunate erroneous claim made in the acknowledgment), this volume offers 15 essays organized around two major themes: Dryden's engagement with historical and political matters and his practices as poet, critic, and playwright. Dryden was remarkably productive and no volume can hope to account for everything he wrote, but this volume is wide-ranging and manages to present a good overview of Dryden's vital skepticism. As Lewis and Novak (both UCLA) point out, the essays do not offer easy resolutions of the difficulties and contradictions underlying Dryden's thinking. And indeed the essays, all by notable scholars, are admirably open-minded. The volume contains two essays about Dryden and music. The included CD, Dryden's Songs, offers four brief recordings. This volume joins two other collections of celebratory tercentenary essays: John Dryden: A Tercentenary Miscellany, ed. by Susan Green and Steven Zwicker (2001), and John Dryden: Tercentenary Essays, ed. by Paul Hammond and David Hopkins (CH, Apr'01, 38-4322). ^BSumming Up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty. J. Wilkinson emeritus, Youngstown State University